No more than it is appropriate to go through Malek Khemiri’s photographs at a run, one should not look for a practice of reporting in Black Babel. His approach, subject to the authority of current events, nonetheless tends to go beyond them. These images taken between January and February 2021, would they be more than small pebbles left behind, snapshots of memory? From that winter, when the pandemic was in full swing, we will have kept the memory of corseted nights, sucked in until noon by the clamor of the riots whose day would prolong the echo.
What is offered to the eye is scenes that fit together too well, because everything is there: from hooded faces to drones, without forgetting of course the fireworks and the cops sprayed with paint or spat upon. But let’s be reassured: there can be no narrative in Khemiri’s work other than contraband.
What challenges us is the way in which Khemiri is at odds with a certain exercise of photojournalism. Here, the eye does not investigate nor does it seek the exceptional shot. To the omnipresence of the slogan and the word, he prefers the opacity of bodies and the grammar of gestures. It is less the presence on the square that interests Khemiri than what makes up the subalterns, a fraction of a social body eaten away by despair and shouting its anger in the face of arbitrary arrests and sentences. If the report of these anonymous people goes beyond the presence in a public space confiscated under the blind spot of the state of emergency, the photographer is solid at the post to probe the pulse of antagonisms and solidarity in presence.
It is in this that Black Babel would be of a paradoxical fecundity. Flirting with abstraction to the point of duplicity, as if it could grasp the raw fact, the documentary facture of this series is somewhat perverted, between the possible and open place to the accident and the premeditation of the frame inside which the real and its double come to be inscribed. One would say of this maverick that he rushes into the middle of events where it hits, then sets off again on the hunt as if in battle.
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