“Each of the consciousnesses on stage has made the leap, from nothingness to justified Being.
From unjustified being to Nothingness, whence the finite appearance of the expression”
— Frantz Fanon, Parallel Hands.
The story of the protagonist Sadok Ben Rachid (Tunisian poet, singer and prisoner of the First World War) overlaps fact and fiction. It is based on research between the archive collections of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the Lautarchiv Berlin, and other counter-archives. as well as Frantz Fanon's play 'Parallel Hands' (1949). Sadok was a soldier in the North African forces, recruited by the French (1914) and used in the major battles of Europe before being captured by the Germans (1916). Following Fanon's theatrical and psychiatric thought, the performance aims to decipher the consequences of colonialism and the understanding of alienation that have produced multiple forms of relational illness. Sadok's existential sonic refusal / poem comes as an autobiographical counter-narrative, a form of resistance or rather survival, acknowledging and raising the notion of ethics and aesthetics for those who usually impersonates the voice’s subject. Ltaief’s performance project «The Concretely WE: Voices From Within The Camp» investigates and re-traces the early phonographic sound archives that were commissioned and classified in the 1910s. These archives include prompt ethnographic recordings made by the Prussian Phonographic Commission (Germany), established by Wilhelm Doegen and assisted by H. Stumme and R. Lachmann with prisoners of the First World War at the "Halbmond Camp" in Wünsdorf (south of Berlin) between 1915 and 1918.
