better quality here: http://vimeo.com/113370229
FILM BY MALIK NEJMI (2015)
LOOP OF 25 MIN.
Video HD 2K, color, sound
projection of 6m, 4 speakers
résidence Villa Medicis Academie di Francia 2014Video HD 2K, color, sound
projection of 6m, 4 speakers
Programme Hors les murs 2015
Fonds National d'Arts Graphiques et Plastiques
Institut Français de Florence
Kulte Gallery
Production Imagin film Paris
Productrice Anne Laure Dagorn
Directeur de la Photographie : Frederico Martucci /
Ingénieur du son : Alessandro Rolla /
Assistant : Giuseppe Spanpinato
Monteur : Cyrill Curchod
Musique et sons : Mathieu Gaborit
The figure of the african street vendor is for me, central to the collective and popular representation of our contemporary world. I admire the courage of these young Senegalese vendors, their way of life and their careers are in the image of the trial they live.
Italy is following the assassination of Samb Modou and Mor Diop in Florence in December 2011 (the murderer belonged to Casapound fascist party), I started to approach Senegalese street vendors of the Florentine city. Following a year of commemorations, I attended a mosque in a very moving collective prayer in memory of "those who where dead". In talking with my friend Souleymane, the brother of one of the victims I realized that this prayer was not relieved families and they expected this year, two years later, to pray their dead as they should in Senegal: all men read the Koran together by sharing traditional offerings.
The title refers to a poem Birago Diop "The dead are not dead," which was regularly utlise speech in 2011 by Mr Pape Diaw, then head of the Senegalese community of Tuscany, to calm the youth during the riots nights that followed this terrible murder ... In a moment of collective struggle and pure memory, the film (a remounting sequence) tries to show the challenges between religion and politics in the Italian Senegalese community. This is a single time when families were allowed to leave this film particularly moving moment in view of the protagonists suffered by racist events. For most, this prayer turn them to real transition, to the concept of "forgiveness" and tgives us the exemplary value of integration behaviors while giving measure of anxiety that sprang from this community. Again, this film is showing us the political fight of black community inItaly actually.
"This is a moment of pure memory. Variations in voice Mr Idy Diene (brother victim) singing suras, when it collapses, where it supports the gradual arrival of men passing throughthe fixed field of the camera, the gradual rise of the reading of the Koran several voices (thirty) and the slow descent to the last word, then, silence, sharing gifts
and discussion with the marabout in the room, the answers to the marabout hearts of men ... all a rhythm independent film, a film whose length is dictated solely by the need to support the players, bring them to the end. Leaving one by one the small mosque illegal, people thanking us the way.
The group was also giving the image of a huge raft in the middle of trial. Today the video runs in families returned home between Dakar and Florence, I like the idea that the film accompanies life in all these tests. Today it is both a valuable document for the history of Senegalese in Europe, and a film that has nothing to do with contemporary art but how traditional devices of museum demonstration of cinema and languages of the reel." Malik Nejmi