Before becoming a show, Sea of Silence went through different incarnations. Can you tell us about how this long-term project came about?
This project has taken several forms: artistic installation, performance-objects… The idea was to follow in the footsteps of women who decide to leave their home country. Whatever their reason for leaving may be, they are always painful. I began this work four years ago already, and over those four years I’ve had the opportunity to meet many women. I met them in the cities where their exile had led them. I was fascinated by the willpower and strength of those women who gathered all their courage to take the risk of crossing borders in order to survive and have a better life. Disobedience is a political act. The number of migrations has greatly increased over the past decade. I wanted to meet those women to understand in detail their life stories and not think about migration in an abstract way. I wanted to go deeper, below the surface. I built real relationships with some of them.
What were the different steps?
One of the first milestones which led to a real encounter with the public was an installation called Sculpting the silence, created during the pandemic, in connection with Chile. We used thirty tonnes of salt to create a landscape in which the audience could walk around, accompanied by a soundtrack and the poetic writing of playwright Gabriel Calderón. It was a political stroll. The theme of hesitation, where a character looks back during their journey, is a common subject in literature and theatre that particularly interests me. This kind of journey, often long and challenging both physically and emotionally, shows us the transformation of the human as they get closer to their final destination. It is a testimony of extreme resilience. In that sense, the story of Lot’s wife in the Book of Genesis greatly impacted me: she was turned into a statue of salt after looking back at Sodom, her burning city she was fleeing. Those women have no other choice but to look forward. That’s what my research is about, the motif of the journey that transforms the human and their way of thinking, that drives them to establish strategies of survival and resilience. It’s not about gathering testimonies, or turning people into victims: I try to have as open a philosophical approach to the subject as possible. This project is permeated by the theme of colonialism. It is fundamentally anti-capitalist.
How do the community you’ve brought together and the unique ritual you’ve created constitute a critique of the capitalist system?
The form we are presenting at the Festival d’Avignon corresponds to the culmination of my long research. In a way, this play marks the end of a journey. I worked with seven actresses I’d never met before to create a ritual that could shake the walls of our capitalist and colonial world. I wanted those seven women, unlike the many who have fled their countries, to not be uprooted but to have chosen to stay in spite of the difficulties they face. I wanted them to still be connected to the local communities and languages. Those women resisted migration. They are from Nigeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay. We share neither language nor culture. It’s a play full of desires. The women were brought together for this work through a chain of contacts. The idea is to bring together desires and energies. We know witch tales and pre-colonial songs. We form an ephemeral community in a suspended time. We’re creating together a new, anti-capitalist ritual, we imagine a new strategy to challenge colonial ideas and the borders imposed by countries to justify wars. There is a deliberately epic aspect to this ritual. Borders, the division of the world… All of that is fundamentally political.
How do you manage to break away from this system to imagine other possibilities?
In this show, the multiplicity of languages prevents us from using Western, patriarchal, and colonial modes of thinking. We then have to find a feminine—or maybe feminist—way of rethinking things. We use mystery, cultural rituals, transformation, and sharing. In this ritual we’re building together, there is no object, no product in the capitalist sense of the word. It is first and foremost the encounter of a particular moment, which allows us to enter the intimate and push boundaries. Of course, the show itself can be seen as a product, because it is invited, programmed by a Festival before it can even exist, before it even has a title. There is a market for artistic creation, and we are part of it. Therein lies all the complexity of the situation. The challenge is to understand how we can disrupt the art market, the market of supply and demand, to attempt to shake our capitalist world from within.
The ritual you are creating is inspired by the figures of witches, who were hunted for centuries…
We talked a lot about the Casa de la Bruja, about the witch hunt which took place in Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries, during which tens of thousands of women were executed for practicing “witchcraft”: it was actually medicine, the preparation of concoctions and ointments, divination and magic. Or they were exhibiting sexual and social behaviours rejected by the religious authorities. Some of them even just had simple marks on their bodies… Through the Casa de la Bruja, the point was to kill women’s ability to enjoy their bodies, to speak loudly, to laugh, to be with other women… Creating a new language together, coming together like this is a way of taking back power from all those who still follow in the footsteps of those medieval witch hunters. The language is sharp, as corrosive as the salt which metaphorically covers the ground, at the feet of those seven actresses.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalent (February 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach