D'OU VIENT LE VENT

FROM WHERE COMES THE WIND

of FATMI Mounir

FRANCE, 2017, 00:13:16

Production : FATMI Mounir
Genre : Video art
Keyword : Travel, Allegory

Summary :
From where does the wind come that forces people to emigrate? Where does it come from and where does it blow them, from Arab countries to Japan, from France to New York?

Most of the images in this film were shot in 2013 in Marseille, New York and Paris, as a part of Fatmi’s project “The Journey of Claude Lévi-Strauss”. But beyond the journey itself, Fatmi wants to focus on what makes it impossible. The “Camargue” seems to return to the harbor without having sailed; only the Moroccan traditional music makes the viewer travel, music that seems to sing about departures… The music was recorded by Paul Bowles – the very same Bowles whose loneliness is incarnated in the video “Fragments and Solitude”, filmed 18 years earlier.  

The impossible journey? The displacement of merchandise (certain parts of “From Where Comes the Wind?” are strongly evocative of Allan Sekula’s film “The Forgotten Space”) and of individuals, an endless movement. A displacement that Fatmi can feel in his body, like a perpetual failure, he who defines himself as an “immigrant worker” as well as an artist. An immigrant worker who was never able, as Tarek Elhaik wrote in 2002 (Framework, vol. 43), to let go of his original culture, nor build a new one from scratch.

(Extract from the text by Barbara Polla, May 2018)

to print