In the framework of a collaboration with the anthropologist Knut Graw, a joint exploration has emerged on the concept of the voice and its representation and depictability. Charlotte Menin’s is working on a multimedia installation titled Yacine’s Voices.

Yacine arrived in Marseille 10 years ago as an Algerian migrant. He lives in Belsunce, the district of Maghrebinian immigrants, and ekes out a living with occasional jobs. He writes poems. For years, his lines have accumulated on a computer in an internet café in Belsunce. Those lines are in French, which is not his native tongue.

The artistic project Yacine’s Voices develops out of an involvement with his poems. These texts are documents of his migration and his story, but also minutes of his urban and political perceptions. In his poems, he speaks as a migrant, but also as a lonely person, as a human being who is enthralled by the wonders of nature, and a resident of Marseilles.

The result is not a coherent visual biography of Yacine. Instead, the artist questions Yacine’s voices, opens a resonance space for them, and thereby questions her own position and ability to listen.

The work consists of photographs, sound recordings, and excerpts from poems and is based on a collaboration with Knut Graw, researcher at Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin, who works on the theme of the voice within the context of migration from West Africa to Southern Europe.

BIO

Charlotte Menin is a photographer based in Berlin and Marseille. She completed her education in 2011 at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin. She engages in long-term projects that entail a deep personal involvement on her part, and trying to combine a complex self-reflective approach with subjective emotions. This was the case in “Wovon die anderen träumen,” a 5-year photographic work on Roma families in northern Italy and Romania (Berlin, Meinblau, 11/2012), as well as in “Les mains négatives,” a visual research work on bodies, sexuality, and gender (Berlin, Schau, 11/2011; Photo12 Zürich, 01/2012).