MEDIATHEK

"In my recent projects, I’ve been interested in the links that certain people weave with their past, especially people who come from violent environments that compelled them into exile. The encounters with these people, who are close to us and yet shaped by an ‘elsewhere’, attest to our new geographies and to what our environments conceal about this ‘elsewhere’. By delving into these people’s pasts, through interviews that will feed into the show’s theatrical material, I wish to explore the traces of History’s violence on the minds and bodies of individuals who have experienced it. During the encounters that took place for my previous shows, I was continuously amazed at how these private-life-fragments gave such powerful insight into collective History. What caught my attention wasn’t the actual historical facts, but each person’s attitude regarding their own past, and the way that History affects each person’s identity formation. Whether it’saneed for amnesia, reconstruction or reinvention of this past, all these unique attitudes seemed to convey how breaking free is necessary in order to take hold of the present and project oneself into the future. My new show will begin where the previous shows left off. At the edges of civilization and the gateways to barbarity. The instant where people exit humanity to be cast into the jaws of torture. Doing a portrait of people who lived through torture is an attempt to depict the unpresentable. It is about searching for a form that can convey this withdrawal from humanity. It is about trying to grasp the imagination of those who experienced such atrocities, so that this experience does not remain hushed up. It is also about awareness of history’s repeated violence now that torture seems to be tolerated and even legitimate at the very core of our democracies (Quelle: http://www.rachidouramdane.com/index.php?id=460&step=0) isrr http://www.rachidouramdane.com/index.php?id=460&step=0