In 1973, a group made up of workers of Algerian origin linked to the Movimiento de Trabajadores Arabes (MTA) and French students created Al Assifa, a theater company with which they wanted to sensitize the French about the difficult living conditions of their day as immigrants in many cases undocumented. Emerged in the context of a hunger strike without papers, they acted in factories, houses or street corners, and only one year after their activity began, they staged their great action when a young 18-year-old Tunisian presented himself as a candidate for the French presidency. “How is it possible that something like this has been forgotten?” asks the artist Bushra Khalili (Casablanca, 1975), whose bold and courageous work tries not only to give a voice to those who were silenced or unrecognized, but also to all in the ability to recover what has not been documented or has been eliminated as a way of appropriating history.
“Obviously, it was a performance,” Khalili says of that candidacy, “but it was a very powerful performance. With this gesture, the young man points the way towards a way of belonging; just showing up was a way to become a citizen.” The Circle, an installation that investigates that forgotten episode in the history of immigration based on the testimony of young people of Maghrebi descent residing in Marseille and former members of the MTA, opens this Friday at the Macba as part of the exhibition Between Circles and constellations, which brings together the last ten years of Khalili's work (until May 21).
The Circle, a title that refers to the North African tradition in which a narrator explained stories to an audience arranged around him in a circle, is the culmination of an inquiry into those groups that made theater a form of struggle in the seventies. and which began in 2017 with The Tempest Society. In this piece, presented in Athens as part of Documenta 14, the artist reactivated that experience (Al Assifa means the storm in Arabic) by having three Greeks from different origins talk about the social problems in their country, Europe and the Mediterranean.
“More than history, I'm talking about the future”, points out the artist, for whom the important thing is “to build a memory of the marginalized and new ways of creating community”. This is a line of thought that will have a great weight in Elvira Dyangani Ose's Macba, according to the director, who signs the curatorship of the exhibition together with the exhibition manager Hiuwai Chu. An exhibition that brings together eleven installations (audiovisuals, screen prints, photographs, fabrics, record covers, documentation, and a musical installation by Youcef Rocé Kaminsky, to whom Khalili has given carte blanche to put an end to it.
The voices of the testimonies, like the stories they tell, intertwine, causing an echo in the next or the previous one, as if it were a journey through time in which anonymous immigrants emerge who narrate their journey from the Middle East or Africa. to Europe in search of a better life, and old acquaintances such as Pasolini or the feminist Carole Roussopoulos, who, encouraged by Genet, traveled to Amman in the seventies to film the survivors of the massacres of Palestinian refugees perpetrated by Saddam Hussein, and whose film has disappeared due to the deterioration suffered as it was exhibited.
