The Great Myths of the 20th and 21st Centuries Are Crumbling: Where Are We Headed?
La Presse - Life in Gabès
The cinema festival, Fen, is in full swing, with time accelerating to the rhythm of encounters, debates, and fortuitous exchanges between two screenings or in a corner of the corniche lined with containers where stories are unfolding that deviate from our era. Humor will save the world, art will too, and the two together are even better, according to the works of El Kazma, one of the sections of Art Video at the festival. For K-Off, another section of the same program, the young Tunisian scene is highlighted, attentive to the mutations of the present. The proposal is centered on the city, its streets, its squares, and the questions about the place and the place of individuals in urban environments.
Curated by Rym Haddad, a member of this emerging generation, the selection brings together several video works with multiple writings, between animation, fiction, documentary, or experimentation. The works are housed in a building in the heart of the city of Gabès, not far from the Mohamed El Bardi cultural complex where the cinema section, masterclasses, panels, and the VR section are held. Two small streets separate the two locations, and it's almost the case for the other spaces dedicated to the festival, including the Focus Gabès association's headquarters, which hosts two exhibitions, an installation video, and a film by Nicolas Wadimoff (excellent); the Point K, a space for encounters and discussions focused on artistic issues and creation conditions, and Dar Meddeb, where the majestic Salah Mbarek titillates our collective imagination by restoring iconic film costumes. These different locations are held, during the festival, by an armada of Gabesian volunteers, undoubtedly the backbone of the event, to whom we must pay tribute, given their seriousness, efficiency, and great amiability.
At K-Off, deployed on two floors of the building, the works of Emile Bahri Anderson, Nawres Zriei, Elyes Jeridi, Nada Chahed, Mokhles Ben Hafsia, Adem Fadhloun, Samy Gassara, and Mohamed Rachdi explore the tensions of the present, urban landscapes, states of transformation, and forms of passage, in stories where wandering, desire, and mutation occupy a central place. "Creation allows for the reconstitution of oneself in the face of confinement. Creativity and confinement. Two key words for this edition of K-Off. They are the undeniable thread between the works chosen for this year. There are walls, roads, buildings, passersby, streets, a sky that seems lower, and a horizon that's flatter. There are also words and sounds that haunt more than they say. We find ourselves in places charged with the anxieties and questions of the early times, as if the era was bringing us back to the Babylonian era, when man first questioned his relationship with the world. To life, to death, to time, to trees, to others. Because everything, or almost everything, has deviated. The great myths of the 20th and 21st centuries are crumbling one by one: success, law, justice, economy, sacrifice, merit, icons, universalism. And only one question remains: where are we headed?"
For her, the only antidote lies in a shift in perspective, zooming in on the details that surround us, letting ourselves be overwhelmed by poetry, reappropriating the pixels. Art video, where capturing the visible, showing it, deforming it, and giving it meaning, is an absolute urgency. It's about breaking the image production flow dictated by machines and capital, getting out of the "image feeding" imposed by algorithms. A silent battle, she says, but whose effects are already felt. In this landscape of images in friction, the proposals of the eight artists aggregate like attempts to grasp what is wavering. With "Transition" (6'36''), Adem Fadhloun suspends Tunis in a spectral between-two: a city neither fully alive nor completely dead, whose architecture seems to have lost its symbolic charge, reduced to a ghostly presence. On the other hand, Samy Gassara, in "Under the Almond Trees" (4'39''), operates a nocturnal return to his hometown, crossing the landscapes of his memory at the light of a camera that becomes both a capture tool and an extension of an intimate drift.
Elyes Jeridi, with "Chronicles of a Vagabond" (48'), detours the serial logic to make it a fragmented wandering: a prologue and six stations compose a continuous march, nourished by heterogeneous images gleaned between phone, social networks, and daily life. A voiceover unfolds, oscillating between introspection and critical thought, weaving a story where the intimate emerges without ever dissociating from the political. With Mohamed Rachdi, the city becomes a land of appearance and disappearance. In "We Are So Many", he puts tension between visibility and indifference by filming his walks, loaded with multicolored balloons, signs of a party diverted by the gravity of his posture. Then, in a second gesture, he abandons the performance in favor of its trace: the balloons, now fixed in the urban space, persist alone, while the passersby cross the frame without seeing them, as if nothing had happened.
Mokhles Ben Hafsia, with "Neo Life DVD" (35'), inscribes himself in a logic of sensitive archive, capturing fragments of life from the Neo Korp hip-hop collective. Through studio sessions and shared moments, he composes a living memory, where the documentary gesture becomes an act of transmission. Nawres Zriei, in "Ce que je n'ai pas filmé" (13'56''), explores the failings of memory. In super 8, between black and white and color, she assembles scattered fragments of her experience, particularly in Finland, giving shape to an absence, to what escapes recording.
With "Monstru-topie" (3'), Nada Chahed plunges into a dystopian dimension. Nature is altered, almost unrecognizable, transformed into a hostile territory where human presence seems in suspense. The work sketches, without didacticism, the contours of a ravaged future by industrialization and pollution, where the imagination becomes the last space of projection and perhaps alert.
Finally, in "Atropos" (48'), Emil B. Andersen stages an impossible fundamental, that of understanding when voices, instead of dialoguing, superimpose until becoming noise. What could be a simple communication defect becomes here a sensitive matter, almost physical, a sonic mass where words collide, cancel, and dissolve. A work that recalls, with a certain harshness, that understanding is never given, but always to be rebuilt, in the effort and in the listening.
The Blessing of Water
Always in the same section, but this time on the side of the Point K, the screenwriter and director Insaf Ben Ajmi deploys a double video and sound installation, the fruit of the K Residence. She approaches the symbolism of water in southern Tunisia, which, as she notes, carries a memory, a blessing. In this part of the country, water circulates like a living archive, carrying with it ancient gestures, hidden songs, trance states that once linked bodies to the earth and the sacred. Around it, everything is organized, everything is connected. In the artist's research, a story emerges, almost like a persistent rumor, that of Sidi Bou Ali in Nefta. A founding figure, a spiritual and telluric presence, this Sufi saint from Morocco lived in tune with the wadi, between prayer and retreat, washing and nourishing himself with what water offered him. Until the day when, poisoned, it would have stopped flowing, as if the link itself had been broken. This myth, far from being frozen, returns today with a disturbing acuity. In Gabès, the aquifers are drying up, the palm groves are withering, the water is becoming turbid. And with it, the ritual practices are disappearing, these gestures that maintained an invisible alliance with the living. The disappearance of the sacred follows that of the ecosystem, as if one could not survive without the other. Insaf Ben Ajmi's work does not aim to document, it operates elsewhere. In this fragile between-two, where the visible is cracking to let something else pass. She does not tell the myth, she reactivates it. A work that does not give answers, but insists, gently, obstinately, for something, despite everything, to continue circulating.
