EGARES (LES)

of FATMI Mounir

TUNISIA, FRANCE, 2005, 00:09:17

Production : FATMI Mounir
Genre : Video art
Keyword : Allegory, Religion, Society

Summary :

I want to speak with the few words that I still have.
I feel like cutting off that tongue, sick with fear and shame.
I feel like learning another language.
I feel like having a face, a voice, eyes, tears.
I feel like being a smile.
I feel like tasting the fruit and drinking.
I feel like having lungs, breathing and shouting.
I feel like having hands, fingers; caressing a body and feeling its heat.
I feel like walking, having feet, taking steps; running and falling.
I feel like being a heart and fighting.

This text passes on the screen at the end of les Egarés, a video directed by mounir fatmi in 2004 and presented for the first time at the Espace des Arts of Colomiers at the time of the artist's exhibition entitled Jusqu'au bout de la poussière ( Until the end of dust). Figures of young people standing on the cupola of a marabout stand out against the Tunisian sky. The camera becomes an arabesque which draws both body and architecture, inventing a topology. The political and religious order which appears here (a holy place set against a timeless landscape) is being disrupted by an ill-timed takeover. With a quiet and determined impertinence, these boys and girls silently assert their desire: getting rid of the established order, daring a new way of looking, inventing new horizons.
Anticipating the intrusion of the police force - alerted in record time thanks to efficient mobile phones - mounir fatmi had carefully prepared some cassettes which he knew would be requisitioned. The risk having been assessed, the action was to be short - less than one hour of rushes- and resolute, each one asserting, in spite of of a feeling of self-fragility, the necessity of a takeover.
Which power is it about? That of an individual refusing subjection to the collective and asserting his freedom to love, to invent, to resist. This life instinct comes from a will of escaping the obsessional neurosis felt by those who are actually lost, those who, in the last part of the video, chant, without knowing it, the order lying within the speech.

Odile Biec, Evelyne Toussaint,
an excerpt from the text

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