Still Life Primavera, Still Life Primavera

On 27 February 2024, like many other filmmakers and artists, I received a message from Narimane Mari inviting me to make a cinematic gesture rooted in Palestine—something that would bear witness to what is blotted out on the screens of History, when thousands of lives are targeted by Israeli airstrikes, forbidden from living on their land. But how, from so far away, can we share in the fear of death? How can one resist the world’s greatest misfortunes from one’s own garden? I contributed to Narimane’s series of filmic gestures, titled Some Strings, with a four-minute Ex-voto for Gaza. I wanted to extend that gesture into something 24 minutes long.
I imagined an action where I would move as little as possible. I filmed one minute per hour, for twenty-four hours (without sleeping), on the first day of spring, never once moving the camera from its position.

The garden always more or less evokes paradise, with its tame nature and domestic animals; yet the radio and newspapers constantly remind us that hell is not far away.
While filming, I had a better idea of what might happen outside than inside (although the sea mist still surprised me). It’s an empirical film, an experimental film—made blindly. I hadn’t anticipated all the reflections on the window at night. I had never noticed, for instance, that reflections could layer upon one another, like natural superimpositions.

A silent nature of spring and of death.

It seemed to me that this very indirect approach—through reflection and through the night—gave the impression, the superimpression, that the violence came from our deepest, most anxiety-ridden night.

It was a spontaneous, unplanned gesture. I hadn’t thought of it. My hand was drawn to the image, as if magnetised. As if it could stop the war.

Amid the wonder of spring—which plants, animals and humans all enjoy—bombs fall in the distance and echo inside the head. No real silence, no rest!
The British band Eyeless in Gaza appeared in the 1980s, and I’ve never stopped listening to them. In the film, you hear them like fragments of a refrain—one from my own story, which crosses through History. Sound, music, silence and noise (those everyday sounds that escape us)—I worked on them on the same level as the image, at the same time, in the same immobile gesture of contemplation.