5 vues sur 5 témoignages

M. LAÈ  We are “salt carriers”. I do not know how to say it in Arabic, the salt carriers.
M. KAKON  “Mellah”.
M. LAÈ  The salt carriers.
M. KAKON   Yes, the mellah is the one who salts.
M. LAÈ & M. KAKON  It’s the salter

How to document a performative project that has the will to transform the public, if not trying to document what remains in the public? How do we relate to a story that is not ours? What do we keep of it to make it our own narration?

I have been working for more than four years on a story I apparently don’t belong to, on a migration I have not followed, with a community to which I am foreign. By creating a space for this story to be told in the seven days performance “Mellah” at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, I also created a space for me in history.
“5 vues sur 5 témoignages” (5 points of view on 5 testimonies) is a documentary about the performance, which shows not only the memories of those who lefts the Mellah, but especially the emancipatory power of learning a new language. Based on the points of views of five filmakers on five different testimonies, integrated with my audio recordings, the collective movie reflects also on the documentation of contemporary performance practices that aim to affect the audience.

concept, directing and montage: Alessio Mazzaro                                                                                                                            
camera & photography: Carla Andrade, Claudia Hébert, Diana Li, Daphé Keramidas, Adeline Schillinger, and an anonymous witness.

Notes

1. I gave to the spectators/filmmakers the freedom to film on the support they prefered and had with them (iphone, compact camera, super8, 4k camera).
2. In Morocco the jewish quarter is called Mellah, an hebrew word that means salt as reference to the first moroccan quarter that was built above an old salt mine in Fès. I thought that to define a space through some walls made of salt, was like to create a Mellah made by the same matter of the word, the salt. In this case, to work with salt, was like working with history, to put History into matter. 
3. Between the 50’s and 70’s, most of the moroccan jews left the country in a silent migration, mainly to Paris, Montréal and Israël. It seems that there is no collective memory of this depart. The installation and performance “Mellah”, created the symbolic and collective space, where the memories of the migration and the previous life in Morocco, could be shared in a collective live archive. For seven days, every day at the same time, a different witness was seated on a chair in front of me, between two salt walls. I asked every time the same three questions to start a dialogue between me and the witness, between the audience and this story.