A Celebration of Slowness, a Silent Song Offered to the Earth
The Press — It all began with a gesture, the genesis of a project that had been maturing for a long time to become a tracing of a creative trajectory. It all began with the encounter with the women potters, with the earth, the breath of the wind, and the crackling of the fire. It all began with touch, the senses awakening as we cross gazes, those of creative women, women-totems who carry an ancestral gesture as a legacy. In the beginning, there was curiosity, contemplation, and then transmission. Selma and Sofiane Ouissi created a journey to an unknown world, the red earth that we shape like a material taking form before our eyes, like cave drawings, the shapes, figures, and dolls are the multiple facets of a creative genius that defies time, conjures fate, and confronts the fear of the unknown.
At Dream City, the journey of "Laroussa" began with its fragments at the Attarine barracks. Through the reconstruction of a living workshop and an immersion in the heart of the factory and artistic practice initiated by Selma and Sofiane Ouissi, the ancestral gestures of the women potters of Sejnane are celebrated: slow, precise, transmitted from mother to daughter, they are inscribed in the earth and in time. The public is invited, plunges in, takes shape in the material, lets their hands speak before words. Here, everything begins in the act of doing; a gesture, a fragment, a slowness offered. We learn by touching, shaping, listening to the earth breathe. This suspended space becomes a memory in motion, a workshop of attention where each trace tells an invisible filiation.
Laaroussa Fragment prolongs the breath of "Laaroussa Quartet", a dialogue between craftsmanship and life, between the body and creation. From a gesture transmitted from woman to woman, a silent word is born, a gentle force that connects times.
And we arrive at this spectacle on the Rio stage, with the bodies of women-dancers who whisper their stories, the same story, the gesture is identical, reproduced infinitely, synchronized, offset, precise, slow, mastered. Each gesture gives birth to a form that retains the warmth of the palms that carried it. Here, art is no longer an object, but an encounter. The material becomes memory, and memory a promise.
In "Laroussa", the piece, the moving images (video) make the chain of hands more ample, larger, more intense. The close-up and the insert multiply the sensations, the performance divides, multiplies under several sizes, at several rhythms. The women, generators of the gesture, reveal the details of a body in turn shaped by movement, each muscle of the back that the interpreters show finds its referent in the clay that changes aspect under the heat of the palms.
In Sejnane, the women speak with the earth. And the dancer-interpreters have grasped it so that they too can carry this legacy, show it, and share it in return. For the hands remember, they know what memory keeps silent. In the clay, they shape dolls like one shapes an attentive prayer, full of breath.
Selma and Sofiane Ouissi have listened to these ancient gestures, collected their silences, their knowledge, like one collects the water of a source, an offering... and six bodies have carried the trace of the past, between sound and ritual. This is neither quite a spectacle nor quite a demonstration or performance: it is a passage, an instant, a suspension outside of time, an in-between where art meets know-how, where the stage becomes a workshop, where creation becomes memory in motion.
The sounds, images, and breaths intertwine, the living dialogue with the trace. Here, the body is an archive. Each gesture is written in the flesh like on a page of damp earth. Each movement awakens what sleeps, connects what distances itself. The film keeps the ember of the hands that know, those that shape the world without noise, those that tell without words. "Laaroussa Quartet" does not only show how we fabricate: it reveals what it fabricates in us.
