Malik Nejmi
Research project
Self-managed crossings of the Strait of Gibraltar: the case of Omar Ba / experimental research in Tangier: video, objects, narratives
Project summary
As part of his research project on Senegalese migration at Iméra, Malik Nejmi decided to position the artist as a producer of clandestine border cinema. After meeting Omar – a young Senegalese man in transit in Morocco and living in Tangier for a period of time that he himself can no longer really define – the latter tells him how these sub-Saharan clandestines organize their “self-managed crossings” of the Strait of Gibraltar.
He decided to commission a documentary from Omar and his companions in the Boukhalef neighborhood, to film not only the crossing techniques and their links to the objects of migration (oars, buoys, photos, etc.), but also the rituals preceding the crossing, as well as the everyday life and the imaginary world that develops as the story unfolds. Little by little, Omar seems to acquire the role of investigator within his group of friends, and manages, with the necessary distance, in the corner of a room in their apartment, to get these young Senegalese in distress to talk. His film reveals a material organization that plays on the smugglers, unveils a clandestine harbor master’s office and the organization of crossings in makeshift zodiacs, just as it half-heartedly denounces the role of the military and the excesses of an intangible border on the open sea.
Filmed on a cell phone, these short films and sequence shots reflect Omar’s performance as he unveils his migration project. This production could be a video series, an ethnological film or a museum installation, as it shifts the strategic positions of representations of immigration in the Mediterranean. Malik Nejmi’s desire to move away from artistic strategies and create a liminal, epic work of art, in which notions of borders and countries are dissolved in the migrant’s narrative and imagination, is also based on the observation that migrants and illegal immigrants are never actors in the way they are represented (the illegal immigrant serving as a “political object” in the artist’s discourse).
Perhaps this work demonstrates the urgency of experimenting with border narratives, be they documentary, poetic or autofictional, as these self-narratives enable us to restructure the larger story and better grasp the issues at stake in sub-Saharan economic emigration. For its author, it’s a question of putting his status as an artist back into play and experimenting with a form of “anthropology of the real” and producing, modestly, an emergency cinema “in real time”, to analyze the raw richness of the migratory strategies put in place by young Senegalese in Tangier.
