In Syria I was a Frenchman, in France I was an Arab with a strange name.
Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future: A Youth in the Middle East (1978-1984)
The presence of the immigrant is always a presence marked by incompleteness, it is guilty in itself. It is a presence out of place [déplacée] in every sense of the term.
Abdelmalek Sayad, The Double Absence
Out of place, a-topos, déplacée. A presence out of place, “always in the wrong place” in the words of Edward Said, which finds no space either at origin or at landing. This being a-topos according to Abdelmalek Sayad is one of the recurring characteristics of the migratory experience, which configures a perception of self in the “double absence” between the place of origin and the place of landing: uprooting and absence from the country, accompanied by the feeling, on the other side of the Mediterranean, that once one has “arrived” in Europe, one is never whole anywhere. Neither here nor anywhere else.
Where we are, we are not ourselves; where we were, we are no longer.
“Barrani’ in Tunisian means ‘foreigner’, literally ‘the one from outside (el barra)’. Barrani is someone who has embarked on the journey to Europe. A journey that inevitably leads to being here, there and nowhere, an experience all too familiar to the diaspora generation. And it is to them that Barrani is dedicated, a research work that becomes a space for creation and rewriting between present, past and future, between sound, dance, poetic word and multimedia. A tale, a celebration of diasporas and fractures, of nostalgia and the search for identity that this journey brings in a third and median space that does not exist except in performance time: the space of narration.
CORPS CITOYEN
Corps Citoyen is a multidisciplinary artistic collective based between Tunis and Milan. The collective’s practice is composed of different disciplinary tools (dance, theatre, poetry, video, animation, writing and anthropological research) to create new contemporary narratives.
The group’s goal is to strengthen the values of citizenship through artistic practice, education, research and active participation of civil society in Gine to promote political and social change. Corps Citoyen because the main objective of the group is to activate social reflection through the expressive potential of art and the body in particularly, the territory of a biopolitical battle and space for creative resistance.
Corps Citoyen is a collective platform, where shared and multidisciplinary projects find a home, but also individual works by the artists of the group in collaboration with other artists and professionals.