MANMUSWAK

Man must walk, it is certainly necessary that man live, or rather man-must-live, according to the French translation of Sozaboy, the novel by the Nigerian author Ken Saro Wiwa from which the title of this film is taken. In fact, our man does walk : from an outlying neighbourhood, a city enclave where he shares a room in shifts, through a wasteland ; on the streets of the city centre, in the aisles of a shopping mall ; along the paths of the botanical garden, on an avenue, at night. The town is thus surveyed ; he takes measure of it, squares it off, lives it according to the movements that his replacements require.

Because it is necessary for man to live and, in order to do so, he accepts jobs that have nothing to do with his training or level of qualifications. People from the Ivory Coast have a term that describes the work of these migrants : djossi, which means “to sweep” and which dates from the time when Africans in France were principally employed in road maintenance. Watchmen, guards, bouncers and other security related jobs nowadays seem to be djossi jobs. Paradoxically perhaps, it is precisely those persons, whose legal presence in the country falls under the suspicion of the authorities, who are systematically employed to guard private frontiers.

However, the principle of the relay (between people that he occasionally replaces in their guard posts) practised by the character K, gives him the opportunity to establish “unusual links on a much greater geographical scale that are also socially differentiated”, according to the places he guards and the relationships that he maintains with the population who frequent them, and which “ turn him into a weaver of social networks, a craftsman of the multitude, who opens new perspectives: the links of the great socio-economic network do not only pass through white collar workers and businessmen.”

In this sense, he is reminiscent of “Homo Corona, Homme Ring”, the central figure of the first episode of “Quelques K de mémoire vive”, the story of Patrick Bernier's life recounted at the gallery by Carlos Ouédrago in July and November 2003 (the present exhibition will be an opportunity to hear the second episode of this story centred on his participation in the curatorial experiment “ I Am A Curator”, directed by Per Hüttner at the Chisenhale Gallery in London in November 2003).

Because of the way K moves around and the exchanges of identity to which he must comply, Manmuswak is also reminiscent of previous research undertaken by Olive Martin such as the film “Loop”, in which different actors and actresses took on the role for one-shot of the same couple going round a block in Chicago, or the photographic series “Patrick(s) Bernier(s)” that is composed of portraits of homonyms.

The film is made up of ambiguous sequences - as were the images of the psychological test set up by Olive Martin in the series “Après le TAT” - which let the spectator form his own interpretation. Consequently, we did not want it to appear as a fiction, nor as a documentary but rather as the concentration of semi-lived and semi- projected stories, in other words, as a fiction about the life lived by these people and a documentary about our way of perceiving them.

The film “MANMUSWAK” was produced by the Groupe de Recherche et d'Essai Cinematographique (GREC), with the participation of the Délégation aux Arts Plastiques (Fonds Images / Mouvement), the Fonds d'Action et de Soutient pour l'Intégration et de Lutte contre les Discriminations (FASILD), Région Pays de la Loire, Association Tissé Métisse - Nantes, Du Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporain, and the Maisonneuve Gallery.