VIRTUAL BORDER is a film with a multifaceted geography and a hybrid identity that highlights a possible route taken by migrants along the borders of the Schengen Area, between Africa and Europe, between Nouadhibou and Fuerteventura. It is an experience of a world that is both multifaceted and unique.
I will film daily life on both sides of the border, people’s relationships with time, and the logic of survival—which, from De Port Blair to Port Blair, has been the foundation of my work. I will continue to film the work of Safi and Abbas, masons in Nouadhibou. I will continue my conversation with Constantin. I will seek out the landscapes that connect one place to another, the call to prayer, the music of American rap crews on the streets of Nouadhibou, and everything that cannot be imagined, everything that cannot be put into words. I will film the natural border—the Atlantic Ocean. I will examine the audacity of our European passport, the violence of these journeys, and the economy. I have friends and contacts on both sides—local helpers, fishermen, professional smugglers (in the sense that they do their jobs properly), sex workers, aid workers, and teachers. It is all these relationships—and the way they shape my perspective—that I want to give form to, to set in motion, as a series of vectors. I will add complexity to my experience through regular communication with people outside my geographical reality; I will use our exchanges as images in VIRTUAL BORDER. All these interconnections—that is what I would like my film to be made of.
Somewhere between introspection and openness to the world, between the subjective camera and the documentary image, my research seeks a different relationship to the subject and to the event. My work focuses on globalized exchanges, otherness, and cartography. It is the experience of reality that I attempt to give form to—not through dictates, but simply through highlights. My work departs from the ethnographic approach, which the American critic Hal Foster quite rightly criticizes for failing to sufficiently question ethnographic authority. That is not my concern. “Art, in its engagement with social and political issues, can manage to maintain enough autonomy and distance to say something that only it can say.” “Something different from what economics, sociology, political activism, or ethnology might say. How, in its closest connection to reality, does art assert itself as art—admittedly mimetic at times, but never fusional?” (Jean-Marc Huitorel) Excerpt from the letter of intent VIRTUAL BORDER / Benoît Laffiché
Production : La Criée centre d'art contemporain, Rennes
