To mark the 22nd edition of La Giornata del Contemporaneo (Contemporary Art Day), centred this year on the theme "The Geographies of the Contemporary", PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea presents "La femme qui marche", a project born out of the collaboration between Francesco Clerici’s artistic practice and Khaoula Matri’s anthropological research.
The project takes the form of a stationary journey through visual anthropology, exploring the migration routes of sub-Saharan women in North Africa and highlighting the impact of European and international policies on their lives. It is an investigation that conceals the bodies and faces of the protagonists to ensure their safety, whilst revealing the invisible wounds of their journeys.
The impossibility of truly moving – this state of ‘en suspens’, as Khaoula Matri suggests – lies at the heart of the work. By stripping the narrative of all superfluous elements, the work focuses on a single, pressing need: to convey, through the women’s own voices, the profound violence of this forced immobility.
_
Francesco Clerici is a filmmaker whose work spans video art and anthropological documentary. He teaches at various universities in Italy and Switzerland. Il gesto delle mani, his first feature-length documentary, won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin Film Festival (2015). His works have been screened at festivals around the world (the Berlinale, the Giornate degli Autori at the Venice Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Viennale, the Busan International Short Film Festival, RIDM Montreal, Dok.fest, the Rome Film Festival, the Turin Film Festival, the Sarajevo Film Festival, Ji.hlava and many others) and at venues such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the BFI in London, the Cineteca Nacional de México in Mexico City, the ICA in London, the Barbican, the MAXXI in Rome, Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Documentary Film Centre in Moscow, and MART in Rovereto. In 2018, the Cineteca de Grenoble dedicated a retrospective to him.
Khaoula Matri is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy in Sousse (Tunisia) and a research associate at the Institute for Research on the Contemporary Maghreb (IRMC). Her work focuses on representations of the body, religiosity and forms of violence. She also studies and analyses inequalities and the experiences of marginalised populations. She has conducted an in-depth ethnographic study of sub-Saharan migrants in Tunisia and Italy, examining the dynamics of racism, vulnerability and strategies of resistance.
