Wagons Libres

Straddling time as though you were taking some distance, to jettison the present of univocal representations of its current events, to invent a future for it: this is the whole challenge of Free Wagons and the “archives of the future” in particular an original interview protocol that Sandra Iché uses to speak with her former travelling companions of L'Orient-Express, a French-language Beirut magazine published in the 1990s. In 2000, while she was still a student, she wrote a history of this review, founded and directed by the journalist Samir Kassir. Five years later, this militant intellectual died in a booby-trapped car. Personally moved, disturbed by the political context in which this assassination occurred, Sandra Iché formed the wish of once again questioning the political trajectories of a man, a former team, a country. In 2010, she got back together with the staff of L'Orient-Express and proposed the game of the “archives of the future” to them: evoking today from the viewpoint of tomorrow and thereby attempting to probe the too frozen observation of the “Arab misfortune” and to consequently shed light indirectly on what stokes it, maintains it. In a dual movement of anticipation and a retrospective glance, the actors in this story take the opposite view of the nostalgia likely until now to colour their memories. The chronological disruptions orchestrated in Free Wagons reveal blind spots, accentuate correspondences and challenge the present. On stage, the storyteller manipulates the fragments she has collected – photos, archives, personal accounts –, projects them and overexposes them, compares them and reframes them. She acts with the methodological application of the archaeologist, the humility of the traveller, the commitment of the interpreter who lends her body to the group gathered around her. In a choreographic ceremony, she also replays the gesture of these Lebanese journalists who, craftsmen of the real and of ideas, created, with L'Orient-Express, a space of resistance and freedom. RB

conception Sandra Iché
realisation Gaël Chapuis, Mary Chebbah, Ali Cherri, Virginie Colemyn, Laure de Selys, Sylvie Garot, Renaud Golo, Sandra Iché, Lenaïg Le Touze, Carol Mansour, Pascale Schaer, Vincent Weber

with Sandra Iché
and interviewees Hanane Abboud, Carmen Abou Jaoudé, Omar Amiralay, Médéa Azouri, Ahmad Beydoun, Omar Boustany, Melhem Chaoul, Nadine Chéhadé, Tamima Dahdah, Jabbour Douaihy, Claude Eddé, Antony Karam, Houda Kassatly, Charif Majdalani, Ziad Majed, Alexandre Medawar, Rasha Salti, Farès Sassine, Jade Tabet, Fawaz Traboulsi, Michael Young, Khaled Ziadeh

production Association Wagons Libres
coproduction Le Parc de La Villette (Paris), Festival Temps d'images / Les Halles de Schaerbeek (Bruxelles), Pact Zollverein (Essen), Les Subsistances (Lyon)