In the sculpture Calchi facciale (2023), Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a key actor in the establishment of the Code noir which defined conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire, bears an anthropological facial cast. Chamekh here references the justifications for colonial expropriation laid out through the invention of ‘racial sciences’ in Europe, running in parallel to the affirmation of a genealogy traced to Greek and Roman antiquity in the development of European Humanism —which cloaked under its ideology of universalism the reality of the exclusion of most of humanity from its protections and rights.