Production 2023-2024
– About –
Diary of Eve’s land is a video-installation project that describes, through 5 short films, the inner look of 5 Saudi women between and their daily struggles to balance the expectations of conservative society with their own personal aspirations. They are a divorced psychologist, a physician, a nursing student, a manager of an IT company and an immigrant online university student. Even though there are restrictions in their environment, each character confesses how she thinks about her life and profession as woman. Encounter with them brought me endless surprise and I discovered unknown aspects of this country such as anthropology, history and also daily life which are still hidden from our European and Asian perspective.
This work is including part of my diary of the encounters with Saudi females during my stays in Jeddah for 3 weeks between November and December 2023. This project has been selected by Travel Award Allotment from a Japanese foundation in 2023.
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It was Sally who first told me about the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. I remember her telling me:
– It comes from جدة, Jaddah, the Arabic word for “grandmother” and also this name would come from the fact that Eve, considered the grandmother of Humanity, would be buried in Jeddah.
I met Sally in the spring of 2022, in Paris. Sally is an industrial designer and works in an office on an equal footing with her male colleagues. Sally then introduced me to her friends and one of her sisters. Zeina, Asmaa, Rouaa were a graphic designer, film-maker, dentist… Their presence and vision of life shifted my preconceived ideas of this country. I also saw similarities with Japan, where I come from. What all these women had in common was that they came from Jeddah.
The starting point for my artistic work is events in my personal life, my intimate life even, including encounters. A conversation with Sally about marital pressures in Saudi Arabia reminds her of the similarities with Japan, particularly in terms of framed expectations about our roles and futures.
Sally once told me that her sister didn’t want to return to Saudi Arabia. She had just obtained a PHD in dentistry in the United Kingdom, and had a beautiful career ahead of her back home, but she felt she was too old to have any hope of finding a husband. It was a question I had also asked myself in 2013, the year I graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Montpellier. I replied:
– In Japan it’s the same thing, at 33 you’re an old maid! The best I can hope for over there is an old man or an idiot. And he would have asked me every day why I was still studying!