Touda Bouanani

Ali Essafi visited Bouanani three years before the latter’s death. The filmmaker, poet and novelist who also made drawings was leading a reclusive life in a remote village with his wife Naïma and many cats, living in the midst of huge piles of books and manuscripts.

The triptych video installation Une Odyssée works to the rhythm of the music of Laurent Durupt (piano, percussion), the poem written and read by Touda Bouanani, and the performance of the guest artists.

The triptych video installation Une Odyssée works to the rhythm of the music of Laurent Durupt (piano, percussion), the poem written and read by Touda Bouanani, and the performance of the guest artists.

This video comprises three fictional tales of women's lives. In the first, Yasmine, a chambermaid, depicts her own imaginary world, drawing inspiration from a book of poems by Ahmed Bouanani, the director’s father. The second features a fortune teller who narrates her story using the ronda, a Moroccan-Spanish card game. The third is inspired by the travel chronicles of Isabelle Eberhardt and by Taos Amrouche’s rendition of The Song of Exile.

This video self-portrait draws inspiration from the storytelling tradition of A Thousand and One Nights, in which extraordinary characters become commonplace, and Georges Pérec’s infamous book Je me souviens (I Remember), which collected the remembrances of an entire generation in France. The artist’s voice emerges to claim its autonomy amid a social realm in which the collective supersedes the individual.