Your film brings together images of the Canebière Building in Marseille and an interview with James Baldwin for Radio France. How did this project come about? Where did the idea of bringing these two elements together come from?
The film came about after listening a few years ago to an interview given by James Baldwin to Radio France. I was deeply struck by the power of his deep, low and slightly hoarse voice. It comes from the throat and lingers there for a while. His words seem to spring straight from his vocal cords. Baldwin speaks in French. His American accent erodes the dental consonants, kneads the other consonants and the French language gets caught up in a kind of transatlantic rocking motion, so to speak, becoming disoriented.
Towards the end of the interview, Baldwin points out the way in which France refuses to give the French identity to Algerian immigrants, saying “You have created, just like us in America, a huge [énorme] problem.” Baldwin lengthens the O of “énorme”, making it deeper than the rest of the sentence and making it fall to the back of his throat. It’s as if we were suddenly sucked into the darkness, at the start of Baldwin’s oesophagus, into where we must stick our fingers in order to “finally vomit our histories”, as he says. And in this fall, we come up against the walls of a well which are also Baldwin’s larynx, by repeatedly drawing the loop of the colonial boomerang. It is so powerful because it is the foreign accent that makes me hear, in an expanded version of my own language, the dizzying identity problem created.
Last year, I did an artist residency in Marseille with the collective Suspended Spaces, in the Canebière Building designed by Fernand Pouillon. The double semicircle shape of the Canebière Building reminded me of a boomerang, which in turn reminded me of Baldwin’s “O”.
The building’s construction date on the eve of the Algerian war, as well as the important link between Pouillon’s architecture and the Algerian territory (under the colonial regime, he designed three large housing estates in Algiers, and after independence, he was invited by the Algerian government to build new housing. He went into exile there in the 1960s, exfiltrated by the FLN from a Parisian prison which financial setbacks had driven him to) led me to look [at the building], and made me want to reflect on the possibility of bringing together these two elements and imagine, through the film, a layering of three temporalities: 1952 (construction of the Canebière Building and start of the Algerian war), 1975 (interview with James Baldwin and restrictions on French migration policies) and 2024. I felt that I could evoke and work with the tension between these different points in time through the movement suggested by the two semicircles of the Canebière Building, as if the shape offered a philosophy of becoming. Nowadays there are still people of diverse nationalities in the building and many languages are spoken there. A certain pressure can however be felt, due to the gentrification of the centre of Marseille. Broadly speaking, living together requires complex, and dedicated work, everywhere and at all times.
You film the building without showing any human presence. What motivated this choice? Humans are however audible. How did you work on the sound?
I wanted to use the architectural form of the boomerang to develop a filmic style that would explore the motif’s force, on a historical and political level. Restricting myself to the building allowed me to address human presence not through strictly documentary recording but in an alternative way, with a form of detachment which produces complexity. The film soon seemed to have to be sound-based, and thus imbued with an almost fictional dimension.
The sound (devised with the brilliant Kinda Hassan) takes charge of the narrative, approaching human presences as movements and energies rather than as visually separate identities. It allows us to think of them as encounters, resonances, dynamics, constantly articulating both the singular and the collective, the highly sensual and the politically abstract. Sometimes it triggers other images altogether, like those created by the superimposition of footsteps, which are both those that echo in the building and those of more or less recent exile, of forced migratory movements. Temporalities are pluralized and stratified. Fiction opens up the space before our eyes. This culminates with the more unreal sound that accompanies the shots of the building’s interior, created from the “O” of Baldwin’s interview, which tips the film into the writer’s throat and heralds the second part of the film, completely black, in which foreign languages and presences resonate, and from which the voice of James Baldwin emerges.
Interview by Nathan Letoré
