The purpose of an anniversary celebration is to keep a trace. I replied to Chiara Parisi’s invitation with the suggestion of a dance film that would revisit local heritage sites: the 800-year-old Metz cathedral, the blast furnaces in Uckange as iconic sites of the history of the steel industry, the battered fortifications at Fort Saint-Quentin, the Wendel coalmines whose past ties back to the first wave of North-African immigration and which have now been turned into an art space. 

The suggestion was to bring together these fragments of the past to make them resonate with the architecture of the Centre Pompidou-Metz which explores memory from the perspective of present and future times. In recent work, I have been exploring the emergence and development of a 

mode of thought and dance based in “marronnage”. The term historically refers to enslaved Africans who escaped from plantations with the goal of creating new societies where they could be free. The notion later extended to the arts under the influence of writers such as Dénètem Touam Bona, as a way to subvert a coercive system and regain a place of freedom: “In the beginning, all rhythm is the rhythm of a race: the beating of the feet on the ground, the beating of the heart inside the chest, the beating of the hands against tightly stretched skin. A vehicle of dreams, rhythmic phrasing produces distortions of the bodies, space, and time.” 

The notions of flight and trajectory are central to my work. I wanted the actors to dance and engage with these places of stone and glass, concrete and rust, bringing out their areas of tension. Their dances are born out of different social and political contexts. Each channels its own history and counter-culture. I wanted the memories of the bodies to resonate with the memories of these places.