000030-1509364138

White Water - video, audio, writing

Liberty City, Miami, 2018

The story of Ella. The story of June. Or the opposite.

And the sea blind of such beauty.

The Project

My project is about making an hybrid book. I want to mix-up fiction with documentary materials. The idea is to relate the social complexity between African-Americans and Europeans, using the writing, the audio and the video with this plot: The life of a Kabyle (Algerian) European girl who is living in Miami and the life of an African-American from Liberty City, Miami (Liberty City was a segregated neighbourhood who appears around the 30’s).

The goal is to light the social complexity on ethnicities as the African-American heritage or the French colonisation in North Africa. Nobody in this story is really “white”, but what are they representing for each others? Whiteness? Blackness?

The Fiction

"Liberty City, 2018, after the Hurricane Irma

Ella

Every morning, she takes her mountain-bike and goes to the sea. She works in a sophisticated diner in Little Habana and teaches writing classes in a social center in Liberty City. She is got sun fever, she is drunk for the way black folks talk and she is thirsty of the words and music. The roads are always full and noisy ; the parties and the walks in Liberty City are all the same. Trouble moments, pauses in time. The sun is always burning on her skin, and easily this skin is getting darker, but never black.

June

He sees her, she’s not from there. His daily life is based on the others, his power, his strength, his ways to talk make him able to create networks. He knows poverty is the legacy if he wants to make himself rich. He knows that all the dreams about money ain’t going to make him anybody ; he’ll never get away the streets, the hood, the homes, the illegal business and the violence. He just does what they want him to do and he does it well, controlling the hood. He saw who gets out, who gets in and who dies. "

The Documentary

I want to use photographs, interviews, footages as a report of the Real. How I will manage the documentary materials with the fiction? Or the different mediums? Since I am studying in a Visual Art School in Brussels (La Cambre), I will probably show the short movie with the book in a final year exhibition. I would like to publish the book and also work in some traduction since the book is written in three languages: mostly French and English, but Spanish if the needs appears.

I am now working with Edwige R, who will play the Ella character. We are meeting and focusing on her personnal life and her aspirations. She is a really strong woman and she got that inspiring energy.

From the 9th of January until the 10th of February, I am going in Miami for a one-month instance. During my stay, I will study and observe the city, the economic way to work, the social relationship between rich and poor social classes. I want to focus especially on the African-American community in Liberty City, the crack plague, the ambitions and aspirations of the people, or the place of religiosity.

Formal Production

Typography and graphic design are definitively one of the tools I will use for this project. It allows me to think about narrativity and materiality of mediums. My challenges are not only about contents but also about the way I will give a form to it. What is a graphic novel? How do you treat a video with the text? How pictures could works with it ? This project is definitively a way to answer on new schemes of telling stories.

Screen_shot_2017-11-21_at_11.31.48-1511260347 (Some References, book publication, 2014)

Deluge_interieur-1511259819 (Le Déluge, book publication, 2015)

Inspiration

I have been really inspired by James Baldwin (Another Country) and Paul Auster as american authors. But also Barry Jenkins with his film Moonlight, or David Lynch with Lost Highway and Chris Marker with Sans Soleil have my whole admiration. I also have been at the Read My World Festival in Amsterdam. This year's theme was BLACK USA, and the words and works of people like the energetic Shantrelle P. Lewis, Kleaver Cruz and Rickey Laurentiis have been a great motivation to continue my project.