Ali Cherri
The Book of Mud
octoberoct 19
Ali Cherri ©
The Book of Mud by Ali Cherri was published by Dongola Limited Editions in 2020. Text in English Lina Mounzer. Text in Arabic Mariam Janjelo. French translation Karim Kattan. Performance design and film direction Ali Cherri. Readings by Leslie Carmine (in French) and Souhaib Ayoub (in Arabic). Musical composition and interpretation Charbel Haber.
Production Librairie 7L ; Studio Ali Cherri
Le Barrage is a feature film directed in 2022 by Ali Cherri, produced by KinoElektron and presented at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes
Le Livre de la boue and Le Barrage are part of a wider body of work for which Ali Cherri was awarded a Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2022 as part of the international exhibition The Milk of Dreams by Cecilia Alemani
Librairie 7L and the Festival d'Automne à Paris present this performance in co-realisation.
For Ali Cherri, mud embodies a liminal territory in that it is neither entirely land nor water. It is a fertile place for the imagination, and defies the limits of our perception. Accompanied by English and Arabic-speaking writers, the multidisciplinary artist guides us through the meanders of a musical and poetic performance where mud is both material and memory.
In the midst of the Librairie 7L bookshop, Ali Cherri sculpts a world in which mud becomes a storyteller and where water is the common thread of our story. From devastating floods to periods of drought, mud materializes the way in which the past manifests itself, and forms or shapes itself once again through upheaval and destruction. Adapted from his work The Book of Mud, and its sculptures, as well as his film Le Barrage, presented in 2022 during the Quinzaine des réalisateurs in Cannes, Ali Cherri's piece brings together a female storyteller, a male storyteller and a musician for a musical performance which sets in motion his cycle of work. Through words, music and images, he takes us on a journey which explores the depths of our collective history, buried under layers of millennia-old sediment. If mud had a memory of its own, what would it judge worth remembering?