One Man's Prison Yard is food for thinking about, hearing, feeling, listening to and reading the reality of an administrative internment camp, and seeks to create a state of disquiet in every visitor. Is it an exhibition, an installation, a theatre experience, a visit? No matter. It is that and not really that, a little and everything at the same time. It is an occasion for curious encounters; you see what you rarely see in a museum or on a stage. You must stop there, go back there and simply take your time to look. You read slogans, written on the walls, on the banners, on the flags, in large and small letters. You consult a newspaper that is different every day, written, illustrated and laid out during the night. You listen to “quick rounds of the question”, some 30 opinions of experts weighing pro and con based on a fact, an anecdote, an event. Words that only aim at blocking all the outlets of thinking in a game of opposed parties, a reassuring but alienating system that mimics debates, broadcasts and discussions. One question occupies the core of the system: how can the internment camp, that you go through and you smell, that you look at and that looks at you, how can this camp created in the colonial conquest of Algeria still be present and even more present than ever, in the heart of 21st century Europe, reactivated by the ideology of the control and retention of foreigners? This camp, still presented as “exceptional”, has become the norm of an arbitrariness that concerns over 30,000 foreigners, held in 240 administrative internment sites spread over the entire European continent. The brutality developed against the immigrants continues that which the colonialist European powers used against the so-called indigenous populations. As if the administrative internment camp represented today the colonial hold on the present. Issa Samb, living there, in a Miroiterie that has become One Man's Prison yard, gives body and conscience to this wound. ADB
Distribution
one ticket allows for multiple admissions to the venue
collective creation: Thierry Arredondo, Goo Bâ, Pierre Bongiovanni, Franck Bouilleaux, Martine Brunott, Gilles Bruyère, Jean Michel Bruyère, Richard Castelli, Jany Cianferani, Jean-Paul Curnier, Laurent Dailleau, Florence Drachsler, Nadine Febvre, Laurent Garbit, Vincent Giovannoni, Fred Hamon, Alain Liévaux, Fiorenza Menni, Christo Ohana, Patrick Ranchain, Issa Samb, Rodrigo Sanz, Charles-Édouard de Surville, Delphine Varas
Production
production: LFKs-Marseille, Epidemic-Paris
coproduction: Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), deSingel (Anvers), Festival d'Avignon, Linz 2009 Capitale européenne de la Culture, EZK Hellerau (Dresde), Getsound-Paris, Système Friche Théâtre-Friche La Belle de Mai-Marseille
avec le soutien: de Marseille-Provence 2013 Capitale européenne de la Culture et de la Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur