La fin du dialogue

“Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states.... Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial outside agitator idea.” 

                                                                            —Martin Luther King Jr, Letters from Birmingham Jail

La fin du dialogue is a multidisciplinary body of art incorporating (video installation, sound, painting, sculpture, and performance) – which I started to develop as an artist-in-residency at Camac, in France. La fin du dialogue focuses (the lens specifically) on the French civil uprisings of October 2005, in the Eastern Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, between the police and young Africans and Arabs from the Maghreb. The massive riots in the banlieues and across France were incited by the electrocution of Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traoré, 15, while they allegedly were fleeing the police. More than 9,000 vehicles and dozens of public buildings and businesses were set on fire, putting the country in a gridlock, and the government was forced to invoke emergency powers to quell the worst unrest that mainland France had experienced in nearly (40) forty years.

The body of works examines the political, and social currents around identity and immigration unfolding “then” and “now” in France, and my reading of these currents is that they were neither instantly formed nor conjured up in isolation. Rather, identity entangled memory: actual and revisited, cultural and historical, individual and collective, economic and social systems that exist have all contributed to this sense of disquietude and inertia amongst disaffected youth of African and Arab heritage.