“Each of the consciousnesses on stage has made the leap, from nothingness to justified Being.
From unjustified being to Nothingness, whence the finite appearance of the expression”
— Frantz Fanon, Parallel Hands.
The story of the protagonist 'Sadok Ben Rachid', a Tunisian poet, singer and prisoner of the First World War, overlaps fact and fiction. It is based on research conducted between the archive collections of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the Lautarchiv Berlin, Frantz Fanon's play 'Parallel Hands' (1949) and other counter-archives. Sadok was a soldier in the North African forces, recruited by the French (1914) and used in the major battles of Europe before being captured by the Germans (1915). He was 37 years old when he made several recordings at the Half-Moon POW camp at Wünsdorf (south of Berlin). On 30 May 1916, at 1.15 in the morning; Sadok stood in front of a horn and sang three war poems. Ltaief's performance research-based project «The Concretely WE: Voices From Within The Camp» investigates and retraces the early phonographic sound archives commissioned and classified in the 1910s. These archives include prompt ethnographic recordings made by the Prussian Phonographic Commission established by Wilhelm Doegen, with a group of linguists and ethnomusicologists who captured the voices of colonial subjects imprisoned in war camps across Germany, producing the following 1,650 shellac records between 1915 and 1918. The invention of the phonograph in the west was of immediate interest to the scientific committees of the time, ethnologists and emerging sub-disciplines, as the field of musical ethnology began to organise scientific expeditions and recordings were made locally and worldwide in the context of European imperial expansion. By 1922, the Lautarchiv in Berlin had collected over 10,000 cylinders.
Fanon's comprehension of colonial violence paralleled his methods of psychiatry, equating the effects of colonialism with the causes of mental illness; a society that has created a disease that can only be eradicated by dismantling its neurological causes; colonialism and its aftermath. Following Fanon's psychoanalytic and theatrical thought, the performance aims to decipher the consequences of colonialism, the apparatus of capture, the use of the bodies and the understanding of alienation that have produced multiple forms of relational illness. Sadok's existential sonic refusal / poem comes as an autobiographical counter -narrative, a form of resistance or rather survival that acknowledges and raises the notions of ethics and aesthetics for those who usually impersonates the voice’s subject. Through monologues, visual installation, movement and deep listening, the choreographic and sonic acts are evoked, staged and mediated in a language that is both captive and liberating.
