Zineb Sedira: Saphir

ZINEB SEDIRA SAPHIR Richard Dyer Saphir, 2 0 0 6 . Installation shot, t he Phot og r ap her 's Gallery, Lon d on . T he lone figure of a man, center-screen, stares out to sea, a moped hums past and we hear the watery babble of voices, the sound of the sea; he exits stage left. Throughout the film Saphir there is a developing dialogue between the sea—as site of both connection and separation—and the two protagonists. A woman waits in the hotel Es Safir. She never leaves. It is as if she is trapped in a different dimension of time, perhaps the time when the hotel was built by the French in the 1930s. She too gazes out at the sea, the boats arriving and departing . There is a dynamic set up between the notions of arrival and departure, stasis and transition, entrapment and escape, belonging and not belonging. These binaries are explored throughout the film using a combination of framing and precisely timed fade-ins and fade-outs, along with the exploitation of the dual-screen presentation. Stairs are employed as a powerful metonym for the notion of transition. The inherently aspirational aspect of a staircase is countered in this case by the fact that these stairs, in the street outside of the hotel, go up and then down again. The man is walking away from us, but because of the camera angle and depth of field he appears to remain in the same place, as if he is walking on the spot. Sometimes, no matter how much we travel physically , we are still psychically trapped in the same place. This is the eternal dilemma of the migrant who travels to foreign lands but once there enters into a simulacrum of his or her home: China in Chinatown, Delhi in Southall, Turkey in Green Lane, Bangladesh in Brick Lane; all locations in 1 1 6 - N k a Jo u r n al o f Co n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c an A r t Saphir, 2 0 0 6 . Still f rom video. Two screens video installation. Shot on HD (16:9). Co- com m issioned by The Phot ogr ap her s' Gallery and Film and Vi d eo Um brella, Lon d on . Courtesy t he artist and Galerie Kam el Mennour , Paris. London where the migrant community has made a "city within a city," as if they have transported their entire culture into an economically more secure "host" nation. The shot is edited and framed in such a way that we do not see the steps themselves, only the movement they cause. It is as if the man is on an invisible treadmill, always moving but always in the same place. There is an equivalence to this in the hotel, where the woman is also repeatedly seen walking up the stairs and then down again. It is like a ritual dance of departure and arrival between the man outside and the woman inside, even though they never actually meet. There is a poignant moment when the woman walks down a corridor in the hotel and disappears before she reaches the end, as if she were a ghost haunting the hotel—which is itself a spectral presence. Often the desire to leave, to escape, is countered by an equally strong desire to stay, for things to remain as they are. In shots of the balustrades by the sea we see that the barrier is literally crumbling, as if it is implied that borders are becoming more porous, which to a certain extent they are—with the dramatic expansion of the European Union, for example—leading us to contemplate the more invisible barriers of race, class, and language. People will always migrate toward centers of economic growth, whether it is from the country to the city—as is happening dramatically in China— or from "Third World" countries to Europe and North America. By employing two screens, Sedira is able to juxtapose images that together set up a new narrative beyond that of the individual shots. For instance, at one point the blurred...