Out of place, a-topos. A presence that always seems to be in the wrong place, as Edward Said would say, without finding a location in either origin or destination. This condition of “a-topos,” according to Abdelmalek Sayad, is recurrent in the migration experience, evoking a perception of self in the “double absence” between the place of origin and the place of arrival: the uprooting and the lack of one’s country, the bled, combined with the feeling, once one arrives in Europe, of never being quite at home.
Those who have experienced diaspora seek what they left behind in the country of origin, without finding it in the country of arrival. “Barrani,” in Tunisian, means foreigner, ‘the one who comes from outside (el barra),’ the one who has made the journey to Europe. This work is dedicated to us, the diaspora generation, non-native European citizens, and interrogates, on an individual and collective level, departure and arrival, desire and its limits, the present to be built and the past as memory.
Stability, mobility, what I take with me and what I leave behind. Nostalgia, exile and mother tongue are the colors of a nonlinear time travel, where presence is double and connected, memory a refuge and the body an archive of gestural rituals that constitute home. “Barrani” is a performance-concert in which dance, poetic word and sound research allow a new writing of the self, between present, past and future, in an intermediate space that exists only during the performance: the space of narration.