IRE

Interview with Valérie Massadian

Ire is a collective cry, which resonates particularly with the current context in which women are increasingly raising their voices against systemic violence. How did the project come about?
These voices have always been there. But they are listened to slightly differently now, though only slightly… The voices that manage to be expressed are those of privileged women. Being privileged is not pejorative, it’s a reality, that’s all. The idea is that those who have the possibility to open doors keep them well open for those who are always left behind. I wrote this text a long time ago, at a time when I no longer knew what to do with this anger which is far from being mine alone. As it fell on deaf ears, and faced with contempt, paternalistic condescension and the world’s insistence on acting as if everything was fine, I decided to use my small bit of privilege and to share it with other women.

You have involved many women in the project. How did you choose them and how did the collaboration unfold?
Some are close friends, but I met most of these women during the struggles of the last six or seven years. All of the women in this film are warriors who fight ceaselessly and courageously for more equity everywhere, for dignity, decency—things which don’t seem to be very fashionable in our times. In short, active women, for whom race, gender and class are inseparable. The proposal was simple. “Come over to my house for a drink and if the text speaks to you then you participate, and if not, you will have come to my house for a drink.” Not a single one only had a drink! In this suspended time, the minutes of silence  whilst attaching the lens with the text in mind, there were some very strong and unexpected flashes of intimacy, from them as much as me. There was a  complicity, an understanding which didn’t need words. The words were recorded later. That was also an unsettling process.

There are women looking into the camera and voices that chant in unison in four different languages. Could you tell us about the choice of this format and the four versions?
Ire was initially planned as a three-screen installation, with the different languages following one another, or a street screening. There are only four languages so far, but more will come. It’s an unending ire! There are no subtitles because I didn’t want anything to come in the way of the physicality of the stares, which are at once anonymous and extremely intimate. Each language has its own rhythm, musicality, and emotion, and affects the body in a different way, whether we understand it or not. I was interested in this dance between the confrontation of the stares and the incantation of the words. FID’s idea to show Ire in a random manner, each time in a single language, is a wonderful one, and perfectly in line with the spirit of the film. Six minutes from the  retinas of these women to your retina, during which if you don’t understand what is being said, you will likely want to know. At least I hope so!

« Ire » has a divine connotation – the wrath of the gods but also the goddess of Anger. What made you choose this ancient term?
It’s the word that best defined this ancestral, archaic anger. Past, present and future, all at the same time. It’s our anger: it flows in our blood, whether it’s expressed or not, it’s there. It’s a healthy anger which generates thought, energy, movement, and change, as much within oneself as in one’s relationship to the world, rather than the venom specific to hate. There is no hate, only the vehemence of calling a spade a spade. The patriarchal and capitalist world we live in relegates the living to the background, especially when the living doesn’t bow to its desires and disturbs the established norms. This isn’t a feeling or a political opinion; it’s a fact. A fact as old as the word ire.

Interview by Louise Martin Papasian