“POLICE!” On the evening of the opening, Sonia Chiambretto’s voice tears through the silence of the exhibition hall where a hundred people are watching her performance. Standing on the roof terrace, she recites a text entitled “Just – Not Just,” written in 2009 following an episode of police violence she witnessed.
“I was in residence in a girls’ home in Saint-Ouen. One afternoon, we went for a walk with Bintou, a teenager, and two of her friends. It was a nice afternoon, we had bought some sweets and Oasis at the grocery store,” she recalls. “Suddenly, a police officer violently attacked a young man in front of us, whom Bintou recognized as his cousin. Then, the girls argued, insulted each other, it was very nervous, violence is contagious.”
Back home, Bintou confides in her about a search during which her brother is arrested. Sonia extracts the text read into the microphone. The words capture the audience, and the translation into American English by the actor Lawrence Davis, almost simultaneously, demonstrates their sad universality. Of the works exhibited in the gallery, Sonia Chiambretto’s texts are the most striking, frontal.
I like to think that people understand reality better through art
“I wondered how to put to music, sublimate, make visible what happened without aestheticizing it. Language allows us to versify, give breath, rhythm.” And therefore proposes an embodied narration, contrary to media discourse. “I like to think that people understand reality better through art, literature, than through the news,” she summarizes.
“Song about the death of children”
Among the works, Virgil Vernier’s short film caught south africa phone number library his attention. Entitled “Kindertotenlieder” (“Song on the Death of Children”), it compiles sequences from TF1 television news linked to the death of Zyed and Bouna and the revolts. A special feature is that the journalistic comments are removed. Only the field images, the testimonies and the political statements remain.
A narrative is established a sort of dialogue of the deaf between
a tired population and an authoritarian political response. “This film creates poetry, a form of conversation appears once t
he comments are deleted,” notes Sonia Chiambretto.
In the image, Molotov cocktails light up the night, and you’re not wasting resources on addresses during the day the dark circles under the eyes of the inhabitants take the camera to task, full of weariness and anger. A father regrets the events, and points the finger at Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior. He appears on the screen during a press conference with a martial air.
By coincidence, on the very day of the exhibition’s opening, germany cell number the former French president, who had been sentenced to one year in prison for “corruption” and “influence peddling”, was given an electronic bracelet by the prison administration.
