This creation aims to raise awareness about the situation of people who flee their countries, for reasons of safety or poverty, towards Europe. How did it start? What is its place in your career?
It’s a mixture of powerlessness and revolt felt when looking at the objective worsening of the reception conditions of exiled people and at the nécropolitique adopted by our democracies which led me to staging this action. Two years ago, Denmark voted a law to externalise asylum processing in order to reach the goal of having “zero asylum seekers on its soil.” The United Kingdom decided to deport migrants back to Rwanda starting in 2023. European countries are closing up and banding together to control their borders by militarising them, heedless of the cost in human lives. My—our—political powerlessness is a great source of despair. I write theatre so that we can feel more active. Artistically, I’m part of what’s often called documentary theatre. I explore the real, and the relationship between my artistic practice and the real, for instance when I work with non-professional actors. I see the stage as a privileged place where I can ask political questions, as I do here about the unequal access to freedom of movement. From that point of view, the topic of Dispak Dispac’h isn’t that far from the show Primer Mundo and the film Night Replay, both of which I co-wrote in 2011 with Éléonore Weber which are very directly inspired by the Carminata nocturna, a Mexican game in which the illegal crossing of the border is staged and the roles are reversed. For the duration of the game, tourists become migrants, while the locals play the role of smugglers, border police, or drug traffickers. With Dispak Dispac’h, I’m returning to one of my dramatic obsessions: a journey through imprisonment. I’m reconnecting with Samuel Daiber, tragic hero of my first play, Sx.rx.Rx. Committed to a Swiss psychiatric hospital, stripped of his rights, he creates a language of insurrection. Those projects are clearly localised. I write as a western artist enjoying the privilege of freedom of movement, but also as a Bretonne and a person who was assigned female at birth, who’s had to fight for the recognition of her rights. I’m not speaking in place of the victims, but I’m connected to minorities who have been historically dominated and oppressed, and I use the stage as a tool of emancipation.
Literally, Dispak Dispac’h means “to open up, to revolt.” How, in your dramatic approach, did you base your work on the indictment pronounced during the 2018 session of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal—dedicated to the violation of the rights of migrant people and refugees—and witness testimonies.
The title is a reminder that we are vulnerable. That we could all see our most fundamental rights attacked. Unfortunately, we live at a time when forms of reality are caught in a permanent flux of affects, which no longer have the time to find their place in a personal and collective temporality. The idea here is to open up to a form of conscience, anchored in emotions we almost no longer have the time to feel. The stage allows us to reconnect to that form of sensitivity. It offers us a shared space-time where we’re given the opportunity to watch, listen, and feel. A space out of time, but very much part of the present. Even if I have a very intimate experience of the link between revolt and powerlessness, this title isn’t a literal call to arms. It asks us to return to what oppresses us today: the inadequacy of justice. That’s the entire topic of the play: the laws that govern our democracy are flouted by the very institutions that are supposed to protect us. It is now vital for us to reoccupy this field to protect our fundamental rights. My encounter with the text was of a different nature. In 2018, I attended a session of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. I was curious to see how this independent opinion tribunal founded in 1979 functioned, in particular as a way to overcome the moral and political failings of States as instruments of realised justice. As an opening, the president of the Tribunal read an indictment written by an international group of associations and people affected by the violation of the rights of migrants. It’s a great text, a sort of “J’accuse…!” It takes stock of the many migratory policies that threaten freedom of movement and have led to the violation of fundamental rights. It also lists a number of existing laws that should be applied. In that way, it forces us to study our own chains of responsibilities. To illustrate this feeling of revolt and powerlessness that drives us to action, I’m basing my work on an independent legal argumentation, but also—and especially—on real testimonies, such as that of Gaël Manzi, who worked with a humanitarian association with migrants in Calais and discovered the extent of the violation of fundamental rights in those detention centres. Or that of Stéphane Ravacley, a baker who started a hunger strike to support his Guinean apprentice threatened with expulsion. What touches me most deeply in the work of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, it’s that it creates content based on those types of stories by bringing together associations from the world over. In its own way, this show is a document that will attest that we had this awareness at this specific time.
You’ve talked about a show, but in fact you’ve been using the word agora instead, suggested by the circular stage in constant metamorphosis, where maps and banners conceived by artist H. Alix Sanyas unfold, alongside British artist Francis Cape’s Utopian Benches. Can you tell us more about the symbolic and concrete space of Dispak Dispac’h?
I wanted to create an intimate space that would bring us together and where we could watch each other, to showcase those voices transmitting a content we can no longer hear for a variety of reasons. It was important to me that that space be alive, performative, that it made porous the border between art and activism. That was made possible thanks to my encounter with Mathieu- Lorry-Dupuy. That’s where my other dramatic obsession comes in: my passion for maps. Here, they unfold under our feet. And it’s on the map of detention centres in Europe drawn up by Migreurop that H. Alix Sanyas’ banners fall and Francis Cape’s Utopian Benches land, inviting us to sit on them to invent a different space, a different world. I fell in love with the way this conversational work unfolds right away. Dispak Dispac’h is a sort of conversation, of infinite testimony, which creates unheard-of possibilities for connection, thanks to this mutual fragility we share.
Interview conducted by Francis Cossu and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach