The project :
Finding the sacred in the mundane. Finding the strange in the ordinary. To live an awakening. Anchoring oneself in the here and now. Many philosophies, schools, literary and artistic currents have incited such quests, but rarely has the quest proved as vital, essential, absolute as it remains today. In L'infra-ordinaire George Perec invites us to "question the usual". He adds, "But precisely, we are used to it. We don't question it, it doesn't question us, it doesn't seem to be a problem, we live it without thinking about it, as if it conveys neither question nor answer, as if it were not a carrier of any information. It's not even conditioning any more, it's anaesthesia. We sleep our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space? ».
What method would then have to be invented to define the abnormal within the normal, what path leads to the "entasis" to replace ecstasy, what endotic to oppose the exotic to offer a language to the tasteless everyday person. How to extract the magic from the familiar? This is a difficult exercise. "I don't seek, I find", Picasso said, but to find it, you have to be present, receptive, available and open to the other, to the energy that circulates, to the sun that shines, to the heat that comes from it, but also to simple questions: how to wake up, how to walk, what to eat, how to talk, communicate, how to take a shower, why? Never before have such questions been so pressing, topical and liberating. Raja Ben Ammar insisted on the need to "Pay attention to what is, to the living. "Only in this way can immanence replace transcendence. It is only in this way that the everyday, the common, the ordinary "the infra-ordinary", becomes an object of questioning.
This project is self-reflexive, its method is inextricable from its purpose. A book, a sentence, three minutes, a conversation. Thus we set off, through our two screens, enclosed in our rooms, towards a quest whose object we didn't even know. One book after the other, we failed on "I was casting an anxious glance around me: of the present only of the present".
The set of protocols of the Ancra-Je project is available on their facebook page :
https://www.facebook.com/pg/ancraJe/posts/?ref=page_internal
Oubeyd Ayari biography :
Oubeyd Allah Ayari is a graduate in audiovisuals from ESAC. He has written and directed two short fiction films: Sinnerman (2010) and La Complainte du Poisson Rouge (The Lament of the Red Fish) which won several awards in Tunisia and elsewhere, including the FIFAK Jury Prize (2011). He won the prize for best film at the "48 hour film project" with 2084 in 2015. He also directed the TV film To the Mirage in 2018 which deals with religious extremism and terrorism as well as the mini doc Recto Verso on the place of women in the world of cinema in Tunisia. He is currently pursuing his graduate studies at ESAC where he is finalizing his doctoral thesis entitled "Les Carences de Transmission dans le Cinéma Tunisien d'Aujourd'hui: la Narration en Question" and where he continues to teach since 2015.
Film links :
La Complainte du Poisson Rouge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DQfnA1Btuo
Sinnerman: http://vimeo.com/66781332
Marwa Manai biography :
Born on July 19, 1988 in Tunis, Marwa MANAI is a playwright, stage director, actress and professor based in Tunisia. She graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure majoring in English Language, Literature and Civilization. She is a tenured assistant professor at the University of Tunis. She then graduated from the Practical School of Performing Arts at the Tunisian National Theatre to collaborate as assistant stage director and actress in Violences (2015) , actress and co-writer in Fentres Sur (2016)… by Raja Ben Ammar and actress in Fears (2018) by Fadhel Jaibi and Jalila Baccar. A.S.H. (2018) is the first play she wrote followed by The Name of the Father, her text and direction, produced by the Tunisian National Theatre (2019). She is also the playwright and director for a performance entitled On the Threshold (2020) developed within the incubation project Act Now at the International Cultural Center of Hammamet. She is currently part of the Octopus Program hosted by the University of Applied Arts of Vienna and has been selected to represent Tunisia in the Mediterranean Directors Lab. She is also collaborating in tandem with director Oubeyd Allah Ayari with Museum Lab for the creation of a cultural itinerary in El Kef for their project Hkeya fi Hkeya.