There's two, um, ways that we started on this project
the first thing was because of
the Brutalist architecture of this building here at the Barbican
I thought I knew there was Brutalist architecture in Morocco
and Agadir was one of the big cities that had this architecture
built after the earthquake of 1960
when the city was rebuilt
and then there was this book
that I recommended you to read
the 1967 novel like 'Agadir'
and there was no English translation
so we thought that would be a good thing to start with
translate the book to English
or excerpts of the book, a big chunk of it
and, um,
I think this is the two feet we stood on to start this project
The Curve and its space is like, I think,
the ruins of an empty hotel
after the earthquake, that's why you have this red carpet
the scratched drawings on the wall could be drawings that kids made
and it's also, yes, the backdrop for the actors from Guildhall Drama School
across the street from here, who we work with, we worked with eight actors
who took characters from the book
the book is a bureaucrat sent to do a report on the city
and who doesn't do what the Commission asks him to do,
he comes back with a poem, novel,
and there's very different characters
who have conversations
on how, where, how to, um, pick up your life after this disaster
and how to go on, and what kind of city to build,
and where, and for whom,
and all these questions, we thought, were, um
quite accurately, had a interesting echo in today's conversations
so, the text,
in the text, and in the book, and in the play,
and in our characters running around in this space,
and talking about the text,
you have all these different issues and debates
it's an earthquake, but it's also other forms of disasters
There seems to be this kind of thread of
collage throughout the show,
you're isolating the architecture of Agadir
kind of charting it out through the space
but also the collages themselves,
that act as this kind of central focus point
the film itself, you're splicing and re-editing
footage in this very surreal kind of Dadaist way
can you talk a bit more about that?
I had an important concern, I had an ethical concern about finding the right form
to talk about this, um, this form of catastrophe
these are stories of dispossession and dislocation,
so I thought, working with material that was real
um, not producing anything or producing something from material
and that's how the collage came apart,
they were also about an evocation of the domestic life,
that was completely exploded
people were safely in their rooms,
in their bedrooms,
it was 11:40 on February 29th 1960,
so people were in the safest environment possible, your home
and that's when their whole life fell apart
when one third of the city was wiped out
after this 1960 earthquake, so,
the collages are an avant-garde activity,
but it was also a feminine, a female activity
For the film collage, it's a bit different because
I also didn't want to touch the material too much
but I did completely transform it,
but we used most of the sound
to create a new form of sound,
in the same way the Lettrist poets would work only with consonants,
or the Dadasoph Raoul Hausmann would work with vowels
and by using the sounds and the voices,
they lose their voice,
the only real way to find an appropriate language was to reinvent it through the
voices inside the film, so sometimes you just have an eye that stays open a bit longer,
any mention of the earthquake has been taken off the film and so
you have these very matter-of-fact stories of people talking about
what they did, if they had a premonition, falling asleep after finding your bed full of gravel
but then falling asleep again,
those scenes are surrealist scenes in themselves,
so that's what I did, working with the material itself and recreating sounds,
voices, and even animal sounds from the different voices in the film
yeah, it's like you're finding a new language, both a visual and a kind of sonic, expressive one
to deal with, or to kind of treat this theme of separation, loss and trauma
which is so inexpressible with our everyday language,
so you're finding a kind of new vocabularies to express these moments
and at the same time, we worked with a sound that was playful,
so you have something that's very strange,
but also very accurate when you think we're in London,
and having children play, and laugh, and make strange onomatopoeia sounds
like 'grr', and 'brr'
people lost their language, so they describe by making sounds,
but also, that's what children do
as they play, and we know that
a playground, and ruins of a city is an appropriate way to play
and then the history of London, and other European cities after the war,
many vacant lots and ruins of building were sites for play,
so I think this is also what you can feel in the space,
you have the mad, um, poet who wrote this text
a mad poet bureaucrat, the child, the Dadasoph, all playing together
in what we call at the end of the last piece,
it's called the 'Danse Macabre'
so you have these figures, that are companions,
sort of companions in this, um, strange dance