ART.13

Article 13

Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

The  notion of frontiers struck me whilst listening to the stories of those  who have braved them. The young, isolated migrants that my partner and I  welcomed into our home particularly moved me with their stories. We  heard how they had no alternative but to embark on an uncertain journey  towards an equally uncertain future. The facts are there for all to see:  the difference is dramatic and immorally unjust. Your skin colour, your  religion and your passport make a huge difference when it comes to  en-tering Europe.

It  has to be said, Schengen Europe is a castle protected by walls and  moats, and we choose to remain deaf to the screams of those drowning in  its waters. Every now and again we lower the drawbridge, as we have done  with total solidarity for the Ukrainian migrants, rushing to help the  victims of Putin’s Rus-sian invasion. This sudden show of benevolent  solidarity makes us question why it is so absent when it comes to  migrant war-victims from Africa and the Middle East, who for years have  been turned back and locked away, victims of police violence and deadly  migrant pushbacks by coastal guards. This un-welcome attitude to  coloured migrants is a choice and also a protective reflex, and both of  these vio-lent reactions are proof of many people’s self-interested  selective empathy. Those of us who have watched Raoul Peck’s film  “Exterminer toutes ces brutes” (“Exterminate all these brutes”) or who  are brave enough to look back at history, understand that global  inequality derives from the disturbing legacy of colonisation. The  West’s accumulation of wealth is based on the slave trade, the stolen  land, the exploitation of resources and the spilt blood of the first  indigenous peoples. It can’t be denied: frontiers and borders are a  matter of money and nationalism. Unfortunately, this story continues  to-day…

As  I write these words I feel very white, privileged and guilty. I was  born in the right place at the right time. I’m not standing in front of  barbed wire, trying to find a way through, I’m not on a tiny raft trying  to cross the sea. I can’t speak for those who are trying to flee,  escape, cross borders, those who will never give up when someone says  no, or because someone hurts them, or because they are faced with a  wall. I believe the victims’ stories and I listen to them when they talk  of those physical, despica-ble frontiers!

This angle of focus is the starting point for ART.13,  whose title comes from an article in the Universal Declaration of Human  Rights. This article strikes me as the one that acknowledges the fact  that humani-ty lives on a sphere, on a planet named Earth, whose only  clear frontier is infinite space! This is also the one article which  defines the difference between left-wing thought and right-wing thought,  as Gilles Deleuze explains in his “Abécédaire” (alphabet book). These  are the words that spin in my mind with fascination: “deconstruct”,  “transform”, “live”. Our way of considering humanity by dissociating the  concepts “nature” and “culture” seems
questionable to me. It is yet  another frontier, an ontological one this time, making me contemplate  our fear and uneasiness just “To Be”, to evolve, the possible and the  impossible, how long things last and how long things take.
ART.13  is an act of theatre which tells the tale of an arrogant world on the  point of collapse, refusing to fall silent. The starting point is a  bucolic scene set in a domestic garden, where, on a perfectly mown lawn,  the statue of a man sits high above the ground, raised on its stand  (its “socle”). A symbol of Cul-ture. Nature breaks into this scene when  an animal digs itself out of a hole with an axe. Should the statue be  knocked off its stand, or should the stand be destroyed? Is this an  attempt at revolution or is it the dawn of a new way of functioning?  Destroy or Deconstruct could be the subheading of the piece. Maybe there  are other ways of transforming ourselves. Ways described by Joseph  Beuys, Davi Kopenawa, Charles Stepanoff, Val Plumwood and many others.  Ways which engage our capacity for dreaming of other worlds, of  something different, something better. Ways which would allow me to no  longer be defined as a white, blond, European woman, and to break  through spaces with frontiers, since they would no longer exist. To no  longer dread hardships and ordeals, because it would be an-other world:  an “other” world.
ART.13 is a fairytale, calling forth new paths forward, as yet to be imagined….

Phia Ménard, 25th Janvier 2023