7. pm | Paris aujourd’hui (Paris today), 2025
Fatma Cheffi, , 5-7 minutes
Drawing inspiration from Bernard Heidsieck’s sound poem Vaduz (1974), the artist performs a series of words and onomatopoeia drawn from various minority languages spoken in Paris and its surroundings. Some of these words have officially entered the French language, whilst others remain on the margins. As they unfold across a long roll of paper, they transform into a swirling poem on hospitality, symbolising a space for encounter and connection. The performance explores the power and presence of these words, highlighting the polymorphic and metamorphic nature of language itself.
Fatma Cheffi is a Tunisian artist and independent curator based in Paris. Her practice explores language as a terrain that is both conflictual and fertile. Through writing, the voice and the materiality of words, she investigates its colonial scars and its potential for reappropriation.
7.10 pm | Les images dans le grain / Images in the grain / brain
Dominique Willoughby, 45 minutes
A screening with commentary of the film "Masses Turbulentes" (16 mm, 1976, 17 minutes, 16 mm x 187,500 mm), made whilst he was a student at the School of Fine Arts and ran the MBXA experimental film club at the CROUS gallery. Dominique Willoughby will discuss the discovery and exploration of several unexpected – and unpredictable – visual effects in this film, which was entirely painted with an airbrush onto 16 mm film. This short-circuits the usual recognition of movement by revealing certain involuntary processes of ‘perceptual’ creation of movement, forms, spaces and figures within the random grain, giving the sensation of surfing on one’s own vision, of ‘seeing the seeing’. As Claudine Eizykman writes: “One senses that these sensations, constituted by impulses of primary forms, lie at the origin, at the basis of figurative, affective and cognitive productions.”
Graphic design : © Halladora Magnusdottir / Visual credit : © Fatma Cheffi, Handwritten text on a roll of cash register paper, digital drawing
