Milan, October 12 (askanews) – On the occasion of the twenty-second edition of the Contemporary Art Day, promoted by AMACI and dedicated this year to the Geographies of Contemporaneity, the PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan presented La femme qui marche, a project by Francesco Clerici created in collaboration with anthropologist Khaoula Matri, starting on Saturday, October 10 in the Project Room.
The video installation fits perfectly with the theme because it demonstrates the effects of contemporary border control policies that determine who has the right to cross a border and who is forced to stay. Francesco Clerici, director and audiovisual artist whose practice spans documentary, video art, experimental film, and augmented reality, explained the project to askanews: "La femme qui marche retraces a three-year project with Tunisian anthropologist Khaoula Matri, who explored the violence perpetrated against migrant women, especially sub-Saharan Africans, on their journey to Europe.
We met them in Tunisia, halfway, after having made the journey from where they came from, waiting to try to reach Europe. Our focus was trying to understand the objects and wounds, even metaphorically, that their bodies and stories carried with them, to understand the absurdity of this situation of immobility, which in theory is the opposite of what migration or travel should be.
It's a work of visual anthropology that ultimately took shape as a video art installation because it was, on the one hand, an attempt to find a form for this physical immobility and, on the other, to immerse the viewer in a suspended state. Some of Khaoula Matri's texts are titled "In sospeso," which is the existential condition of those who leave their place to, as they say, cease to exist, because those who leave die, and those who arrive are reborn into a new life. I had a particular encounter with a Gambian girl, who has now returned to Gambia, whom I met alone at night with the sea in my sight. She was trying to convince me that the sea wasn't dangerous. The beautiful thing about this whole conversation, which seems very dramatic, is that in a second we found ourselves talking as if we'd always known each other, and in fact we did. Stories, understanding, empathy should be and must function this way”. Through a language that intertwines photography, video, sound recordings and testimonies, La femme qui marche constructs a form of visual anthropology that chooses not to directly show the bodies and faces of the women encountered: women who have undertaken a journey but who, in reality, are continually brought back to a condition of immobility, invisibility and precariousness. The tension between movement and immobility is reflected in the construction of images, where landscapes, objects, daily gestures and spaces of passage take the place of a direct representation of the protagonists. It is the female voices that take on a central role. It is the testimonies that convey the complexity of experiences. The anthropological research of Khaoula Matri, professor at the Department of Anthropology of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of Sousse and associate researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) focuses on the representations of the body, the forms of violence and the experiences of marginalized populations, with particular attention to the dynamics of racism, vulnerability and resistance strategies of migrant communities. The work is produced by MADAR – Maghreb Action on Displacement and Rights and the IRMC – Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain. MADAR is an interdisciplinary research program dedicated to conditions of vulnerability and displacement in the central Maghreb, promoting collaboration between academic research, civil society, and artistic practices, highlighting participatory methodologies and the voices of marginalized and underrepresented communities. Based in Tunis, the IRMC is a unit of the French Institutes for Research Abroad (UMIFRE), specializing in the humanities and social sciences and in the study of contemporary transformations in the Maghreb and its relations with the rest of the world. La femme qui marche is on view until October 25, 2026.
Askanews