TENIR LES MURS
FROM JULY, 1rst 2009 TO AUGUST, 8 2010
Mehdi Meddaci’s project, "Tenir les murs", sets out in search of a film that will question the boundaries of cinema. At the CENTQUATRE he will work on a story that must start from "nothing", a non-movement: waiting. It is experimentation with this complex gesture in the context of the Sensitive Urban Areas that Mehdi Meddaci transports into the field of an artistic experience.
"Tenir les murs" diverts the experience of waiting towards a definition of cinema: a body that watches time passing. This gesture expressing muted, silent violence has within it the inherent tensions of the almost motionless threshold, not forgetting exile. With this project, Mehdi Meddaci wants situations, dialogues and gestures to be captured as they truly are, verging on a documentary approach, to form the context necessary for this story. This can be filmed only in the present, without any professional actors, without artificial light, and without anything being written.
BIOGRAPHY
Mehdi Meddaci was born in Montpellier in 1980, and now lives and works in Paris. He is a graduate of the Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains (in 2008) and the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles. He has participated in numerous solo and collective exhibitions and has had residencies at Damascus, Alexandria, Beirut and Toulouse. He very quickly set the direction of his work on the basis of a possible memory of migrations and displacements, and the impact of that memory on the profound awareness of a cycle. He is trying to establish the idea of an obsessional exile by populations, more particularly by those from the Mediterranean area. This cultural mix is a permanent source of inspiration for Mehdi Meddaci who constantly works on images and their representations.
"The omnipresent integration of images gives meaning to my life. When I’m editing and installing them, I’m maintaining the desire to live and give importance to "imaginings" of possible worlds. All this is experienced with a pure immediacy induced by the strange sensation of something missing. The mixture of eastern and western culture I am a product of sometimes poses problems in thinking about images. By imagining the signs of that mixture I’m symbolically restating a threatened continuity, a cultural stretch verging on a disappearance."
Mehdi Meddaci
