Crossings, 2017 - Agence VU'

Crossings, 2017

Created by Malik Nejmi

With Mehdi Krüger (Slam)

Touda Bouanani (Performance)

Laurent Durupt (Piano)

Producted with the Institut Français, Césaré CNCM, La Comédie Reims

“An ethno-poetic investigation, a wander through an Afro-futuristic Casablanca, a heroic quest for the migrant who has now disappeared but who is nevertheless there, everywhere in us, and through whom our Western societies feel today crossed.”

Beyond the political dimension of migration, this creation seeks to delve into the marvellous and the dream to evoke more painful subjects linked to departure: the burning, the loss of reference points, separation, disappearance. The result of this liminal experience is the desire for the four artists to reconcile this intimate feeling that the migratory narrative and their respective artistic practices could “ward off bad luck”, tell us and give us a different view of migration.

Traversés is a performing film-novel, inspired by a research conducted by Malik Nejmi in Tangier with Omar Ba, a Senegalese migrant in transit in Morocco who transmitted to the artist a set of objects from the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar as well as a series of films that they both imagined and produced. Around a device with four practices, the prepared piano (Laurent Durupt), slam (Mehdi Krüger), performance (Touda Bouanani) and photography and video (Malik Nejmi) are confronted with the presence on stage of a set of objects from migration that belonged to Omar. Their presence refers us to the absence of the migrant, whose voice reaches us through a dream, while the two narrators’ fragmented narration slowly guides us towards a fiction that is sometimes reminiscent of Chris Marker’s The Pier.

For the four artists, migration then becomes the place of experience, a common space of thought that is only made possible by the displacement of the border.