Lila (Video)

2021, 2-channel HD Video, 15 minutes (loop), color, sound
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Lila is the ritual ceremony performed by the Gnawa, a black sub-Saharan population that came to Morocco as slaves in the 15th and 16th centuries. A form of music therapy, the ceremony helps cure its participants of various physical and psychic ills and lead them, through a color-coded possession ritual, into a mystical trance. For the anthropologist Viviana Pâques, the Gnawa ceremony is essentially a journey of initiation through the seven colors of the universe, where one learns to live, to die, and to live again. In this video work, two female bodies dance to Gnawa rhythms composed and played by Swiss-Algerian musician Khalil Bensid. The hypnotic movements of their hula-hooping are reminiscent of the out-of-body experience triggered by the traditional ceremony. They also mirror today’s longing for both extreme physicality and disembodiment as promised by exercises of mindfulness and meditation. The physical and the superphysical worlds meet at the moment of trance.