Murs (Walls) is a video installation with variable dimensions, created in 2011 and lasting 44 minutes, projected on 5 screens. The video represents the reversed trajectory of immigration, from Europe to Africa. In reverse, migrants cross the Mediterranean, from Paris to Algiers, via Marseille. The slow motion on the gestures evokes contemplation, memory and questioning of the migrant allowing the spectator to immerse himself in the thoughts of the characters facing exile and loneliness. In the installation, a forest of lampposts recreates the verticality of the urban space which is opposed to the horizontality of the sea, the last bastion before the return home.

On the five screens, the scenes are juxtaposed, inducing a montage in which the sequences stand out, complement and accentuate each other, creating a very specific relationship to space and time. The video, traversed by different temporalities and spaces, allows the rhythm of the narration to be accelerated or slowed down. This inverted trajectory thus questions us about the principle of immigration, its expectations, disillusions and failures.

Mehdi Meddaci was born in 1980 in Montpellier, France.

He is a graduate of the ENSP and the Fresnoy. He lives in Paris, exploring video, installation and photography. His works have entered the collections of the CNAP and Neuflize. Rooted in the lives of immigrant populations whose history he shares, Mehdi Meddaci anchors his work in the Mediterranean space.

Mehdi Meddaci’s plastic work is constructed in successive layers in the form of autonomous devices or modules that resonate between photography, video and cinema. Everything in his works resides in the displacement, the interval, the space “between”, between sound and image, between document and artifice, between one shore and the other, between memory and utopia, between the flickering of bodies and the power of landscapes.

Like Murs, which shows a body watching Time pass by. But above all a gesture of a deaf and dumb violence that keeps in itself the inherent tensions of the threshold so as not to forget the exile. Paradoxically, it is while waiting, against the wall, that the need to cross, to go and to return is most perceptible. Walls then appear through a landscape, a land, a territory, but the situations, the dialogues and the gestures, captured in their truth, at the limit of a document, form the necessary context for a story: at a défilement of time.