Naufrage (Shipwreck)

2016 Video, 9 min., b/w and sound

Naufrage (Shipwreck), 2016, opens with wide shot of a man sitting at the helm of a small fishing boat playing an oud, a traditional Middle Eastern instrument that resembles a lute. The boat is tethered by rope to a shoreline located just outside the frame. Mounir Gouri’s video is rendered in black and white, leaving the Mediterranean Sea a muted shade of gray.
At first, it appears that Gouri’s work remains firmly in the nostalgic register. The boat sways gently in the swelling water. The oud music drifts lightly over the sea. The musician is patient and focused, his attention centered on his instrument, he is seemingly oblivious to the sun slowly moving toward the horizon. Then another man steps into the frame, which widens slightly to accommodate him, standing first on land and watching the boat, a crescent star drawn in charcoal on the nuke of his neck. But the second man is different, the way he moves is not that of a fisherman or of a traditional musician. His gestures are decisive, as though propelled by an internal sense of direction.
This second man wades out to the boat and climbs into it. His back to camera, he takes off his shirt to reveal a torso marked with works and symbols in what appears to be charcoal. When he begins to dance, the video metamorphoses from picturesque to something stranger, more discordant. His gestures are sharp, made with straight lines, like those of a techno dancer or a raver. His body stutters in response to the music. His performance is not graceless, but his movements do not align, they are drawn from a different repertoire.
The rest of the roughly nine-minute video is a portrait of these two men coexisting on that boat, moving with the sea. Each of them present to the moment in a different way. Like the boat that remains tethered to a seashore that the viewer is not shown, each man is connected to an aesthetic language that is elaborated off-screen, in some other context, either a wedding party or a warehouse concert. The work is portrait of their simultaneity in music and, also, their mutual alienation.
The work’s title begs the question: What shipwreck? The piece as a metaphor for perception of the future by the overwhelming proportion of Algeria’s youth population. How will these young women and men synthesize the history with contemporaneity, in music or in the body? There is nowhere to go, there is nothing to do where they are, and so they go the edge of land and improvise in the face of the disaster that has been announced.

 Texte de Natasha Marie Llorens