Festival actoral / Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, Acting Fantasma

Taking the world of video games as his starting point, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan deploys avatars to explore the other side of the gaze: no longer just the one being observed, but the one that integrates, re-enacts, and performs injunctions.

He is interested in how men from African diasporas in France deal with contradictory and often binary expectations. To be strong, solid, virile, threatening, or on the contrary, funny, malleable, harmless: two caricatural poles between which the body is ordered to position itself.

Through the figure of the avatar, the piece draws an analogy between these social assignments and the logic of gaming: choosing a skin, taking on a role, optimising a posture to survive in the common space.

It is precisely the point where gender and race become fixed that interests Samir Laghouati-Rashwan and his performers Manu Garçia Mpasi and Trésor Gennai Yahaut.