“On the ineffectiveness of our works in real life”.

In July 2023, visual artist Kader Attia and director Eva Doumba published a text (in Analyse Opinion Critique) in response to the youth “riots” that followed the killing of young Nahel by a policeman. Their text questions the usefulness of artistic works, even when they have a social content.

In my opinion, this text is a useful start to raising awareness. But in my opinion, there are three important issues that remain unquestioned:

1. The social privileges that the cultural milieu has enabled them to attain, which have to do with the subject of the discrepancy in their works.
2. How the forms of their works themselves can be discriminating.
3. This follows on from the previous one: how to practice encounters with “audiences” differently, i.e. to integrate cultural rights into artistic practices.

So, perhaps the question is not so much to remain silent in order to resist and generate political action, as to question one’s own working methods and the forms of acquired social domination, which inevitably infuse the works. In short, for me, their merit is great, they open an important door; and we need to go deeper in our questioning. In other words, we need to look at politics and the fight against discrimination radically in terms of individual action, and not just in terms of the choices and financial resources we need to obtain from elected representatives.

For example, a school based on the values of educational violence and submission to authority, as ours is, might do even worse if it had more resources. This is shown by the OECD every 3 years in the Pisa report, which shows that our school is one of the most unequal in the world, and this remains a dead letter with the institution in France.

Furthermore, citing the Covid-19 period without putting into perspective the political moment that it was (citizens’ acceptance of the government’s designation of a scapegoat and the implementation of a system of discrimination against a part of the population on a health pretext) seems to me to be a form of democratic unconsciousness. In fact, during this period in France, only a tiny proportion of artists and cultural venues mobilized, notably against the incoherent obligations to close cultural venues, unlike in Belgium, where the collective mobilization of the cultural sector enabled venues to remain open. Artists, perhaps unconsciously so as not to lose their privileges and subsidies, agreed to bow to arbitrary government decisions that were undemocratic in their processes and discriminatory in their effects. So, what did the majority of artists defend during this recent period? Democracy, or their own privileges?

For the record, article 35 of the Constitution of June 24, 1793 clearly states: “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties”. Let’s not forget that democracy does not depend so much on the actions of a government as on the actions of its citizens.

This text is a very useful democratic act, and I welcome it as such. It opens me up to the desire for further reflection, so my criticism is to be taken in a constructive sense.

From the ineffectiveness of our works in real life

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

The power funding us to denounce it makes our words the weapons of our own silences. By celebrating our work, by subsidizing it, by giving us the mission of “including” those who look like us, power, because it allows violence and murders by public servants acting on its authority, turns us into inconsequential puppets and useless idiots.

This text was written by director and author Eva Doumbia and visual artist Kader Attia. Our reflections have been nourished by a series of emails, discussions and telephone calls between artists, the majority of whom come from post-colonial immigration backgrounds. They are novelists Diaty Diallo and Fabienne Kanor, playwrights and directors Penda Diouf, Karima El Kharraze, Mohamed El Khatib, Marine Nguyen Bachelot, Laurène Marx, Laetitia Ajanohun, Ronan Chéneau, Mohamed Guellati, Caroline Guiela Nguyen, filmmaker Alice Diop.

On June 27, 2023, images of what looked like the live execution of a teenager circulated on social networks. Like the agony of Georges Floyd, three years earlier, the event aroused shock, horror and sadness. In response to this umpteenth act of murderous violence perpetrated by a law enforcement officer, the youth of working-class neighborhoods rose up in anger. Buried for years, their anger is rooted in the humiliations they and their parents have suffered in professions that were declared essential during the Covid pandemic.

The revolt has manifested itself in the destruction of symbols of cultural wealth: theaters, libraries, museums. We’re not surprised. What frightens us is the way in which this rage, through the media, has met with the racism of too large a section of the French population. For the denial of a young human being’s childhood is disturbing in its resemblance to periods of history that the peoples of Europe had sworn not to go through again.

Like Nahel M., we were born to parents of non-European origin. Like Nahel M., we spent our youth in tower blocks and housing estates. But unlike Nahel M., those of us who were able to live beyond the age of 17 no longer live in these neighborhoods. After high school, we embarked on an artistic career. We created works, installations, photographs, produced stories, staged events... based on our life experiences.

We tackled the sensitive subject of police violence. The death of a young person at the hands of a police officer is a blow to the power of political art. For decades, we’ve tried to bear witness in the hope that our artistic work would change the collective imagination and bring about a society where “this” never happened again.

When it comes to taking a stand and writing in the press or on social networks, everyone is faced with the following paradox: the urgency of saying something imposes the need to remain silent. It is this paradox that we are attempting to clarify here, so that it can open up a reflection on the place that progressive artists should have in a society in peril, and imagine strategies to avoid emptying of their meaning, of our sincerity, the words that are part of the socio-political or historical reality. For Nahel’s death shows the ineffectiveness of our works in real life. Our names at the bottom of platforms and manifestos fail in the same way. In recent days, the hope raised by the minutes of silence and texts read out at the start or end of shows has faded with the reading of articles in CNEWS, BFMTV or Le Parisien.

For several years now, the powers that be have been trying to make us believe that times are changing, that Western society has finally opened up to inclusive diversity, by naming racialized people here and there.

But words are not things. Neither are statements or symbols. The truly dead belong to their families. The parents, cousins, brothers, sisters, spouses and neighbors of the victims of the police crimes and racism we denounce are absent from the places of culture where we tell their stories. In this way, we contribute to turning their lives into fictions. Just as the toponymy of a city often suggests the disappearance of a place or a person, they lose their own essence and become abstractions. While we receive applause and standing ovations for denouncing the wars and shipwrecks that bring death to so many misnamed “migrants”, children continue to be pursued by dangerous police and whole families drown in the Mediterranean...

The powers that be fund us to denounce them, and use our words as weapons of our own silence. By celebrating our work, by subsidizing it, by giving us the mission of “including” those who look like us, the powers that be, because they allow violence and murder by public servants acting on their authority, turn us into inconsequential puppets and useless idiots.

What does “inclusion” really mean? Include whom and to what? This word is too closely associated with the unfortunate terms “ensauvlement” or “de-civilization” to inspire confidence. Claiming de-civilization implies a loss of humanity for those affected. But we know what it means to deny humanity. Our ancestors learned it, and sometimes their descendants have passed it on to us. Rather than an injunction to include, we would prefer to talk about sharing and mutual learning, enrichment, encounters and diverse thinking. And finally, justice and equality.

By supporting our artistic work, the institutions of power claim to act for a better way of living together. But that’s not enough. We need concrete action against discrimination. Real resources for the schools and colleges where we work, and where we can only observe the State’s disengagement. Substantial funding for social and community centers and MJCs, whose day-to-day missions cannot be replaced by the workshops we produce from time to time. Others before us - sociologists, activists, street educators and other social workers - have described the disintegration and abandonment of the associative fabric in our neighborhoods. Replacing social policy with authoritarianism is futile.

You can’t buy social peace by building music, dance and theater venues, museums and art galleries in places where people who don’t frequent them live. We who present our work on these stages sadly observe that they also produce exclusion. We refuse to let our work be used by politicians to absolve themselves of the need to act against racism and all other forms of discrimination.

Perhaps we should exercise our right to withdraw. Our ancestors stopped practicing their rituals so as not to offer them up to the curiosity or greed of their colonists, so perhaps we should stop talking. But how can we when anger and injustice compel us to speak out?

We stand with those marching for the repeal of Article L435-1 of the Internal Security Code, introduced in 2017. This law, which allows law enforcement officers to shoot children who look like our own, or the children we used to be. These young people who make up the sometimes silent, and very often noisy because alive, public of our art galleries or theaters. We work for them too. Because we work for everyone.

Kader Attia
Visual artist

Eva Doumbia
Director, author and actress