Astérismes (Fig. 1-3)

Bouchra Khalili occupies three theater stages, offering the present a sensitive echo of hidden memories and forgotten stories.With her project Asterisms (Fig. 1 to 3), Bouchra Khalili, visual artist invited to the 2025 edition of the Festival d’Automne, successively invests three theater stages to explore the links between the representation of buried histories, performance, and moving images. Drawing from research on the Arab Workers Movement, active in the 1970s, and the theater troupes that emerged from it, as well as ancestral forms of collective storytelling in Morocco (storytellers and public writers), her works stage various representations of memory and myth, public space, and the figures of the artist and performer. Athens, Marseille, Marrakech, Paris; Isavella, Giannis, Elias, Philippe, Mustapha, Smaïne, Hedi, Mia, Lucas; Al Assifa, Al Halaka, Djellali Kamal, Mririda n’Aït Attik; today and long ago, from the 1970s to the 2020s: so many places, experiences, voices, and moments that Khalili brings together in this unprecedented project.The first stop is at Théâtre de Gennevilliers with the video installation The Tempest Society (2017), which imagines the contours of a community where the circulation of speech and historical awareness create connection. On the Berthier stage, she revisits the history of the Al Assifa and Al Halaka troupes, reactivating their hidden memories and exploring the transmission of struggles for equality.At Théâtre de la Ville – Sarah Bernhardt, as the grand finale, Khalili presents three works including her latest creation. Filmed this summer in Morocco, The Public Writer is the second part of an ongoing trilogy. Following The Public Storyteller (2024) and preceding The Public Reader, still in development, this new video installation follows the young disciple of a public writer who composes and sends messages to ghosts—and for ghosts. Or perhaps he himself is the ghost of a ghost? Like the Amazigh storyteller and poet Mririda n’Aït Attik, active in the first half of the 20th century in the High Atlas, who haunts the film from beginning to end.