District of Valdegour, in Nîmes. Since 1986, Madani Marzuk has been a priceless treasure. Shortly after his arrival in 1979, she looked for a way to fit into the life of this city. For this she took a camera, a microphone and filmed his daily life of her. You made a documentary film out of it, and a multitude of memories, which have become precious.
We haven’t seen time go by, but it’s already 2022. All these buildings in working-class neighborhoods are starting to age. Even cities have their history, their movements, their trends. And if you can’t remember it well, that’s fine, just ask Madani Marzuk, she filmed everything. She arrived in Nîmes, in the Valdegour district, in 1979, and soon began to want to act in her neighborhood.
In the late 1980s, a handful of associative leaders energized civic life in the city of Nîmes. They organize debates, create structures, set up festivals, train young people in videotaping and political responsibility. They created the Espoir association in 1988, then Espace Création Vidéo in 1994. A protagonist of these mobilisations, Madani was not content to simply lead the events.
We had to keep track of all this, these testimonies, the destruction even sometimes, these mobilisations, these celebrations.
Whenever he can, he takes out his camera. For more than 30 years she has filmed every important episode in the life of the city and carefully preserved the tapes. “I always took out my camera, he explains. Je ne sais pas très bien pourquoi je le faisais, mais j’avais quand même au fond de my l’intuition qu’il fallait garder une trace de tout ça, de ces témoignages, de destructions même parfois, de ces mobilisations, de ces Parties. I thought it would have value someday. It’s not for me that I did it, it’s for those who would resume fighting, for those who would resume music. Who have photos of their ancestors, who remember what notes we played.”
For years, he worked with a small team to piece together some footage, and in 2018 he first released a documentary, which he titled ” S’hab la ZUP “. “That’s what we called ourselves”, explains Madani. “S’hab” means “the boys of” in Arabic. A film that traces the main lines of the movements of his city of Nîmes, and which is part of the heritage of history of popular neighborhoods.
Today there aren’t as many people as before, everyone has gone their own way and most of yesterday’s leaders have preferred to hold a position in the town hall or elsewhere. All the associations have been closed and the festivals no longer exist. “Town Hall took over the events we had created, with much more budget, but it never really worked. They ended up stopping everything.” Almost.
With the AMIS association he created in 2006, Madani continues alone to teach young people how to adjust a camera, point or shoot sound. “Memory capture can be learned. I invite all young people to film what is happening at home. Because over time it will become something important“When he shows us his neighborhood, we have the nostalgia of those who move on the remains”.Well, we are in Avaugadro square, comments Madani. This is where it all happened. People met to participate in mobilizations or to go to the beach“.
The few elderly people chatting on a bench add to the melancholy of a distant time. At one of the corners of this square stands a huge building. At the very top, above the top floor windows, we see “THANK YOU” written in capital letters in the center of a huge red heart. “It is a historical tower. The tallest in the entire district, Madani says. The firefighters came from its roof to see if there were any fires in the area, it is also from up there that the young people abseiled down. They will soon destroy it, no one lives there anymore. This inscription is a way for young people to say goodbye.”
They demonstrated and left. The Fatiha, the Nordine and the others. We are left with the memories and slogans. The struggles, the mobilizations, the hopes enclosed in the voting booths of the 90s. Sepia-colored photos where the boys smile and seem to say things that no one remembers, in Sergio Tacchini overalls.
The memory of girls with curly hair and jeans pulled up to the navel “JI have a friend who always told me: let’s not move on until we’ve written historyIt remains to be written, Madani still resists, like the 90s labels in Piazza Avogadro, there is no need to be thousands, a single witness is enough to save the whole story.
