A burning question
This project emerged when the question ‘WHO AM I’ started burning differently in my life back in 2012. I had just purchased a Canon 5D and decided to start interviewing people about who they were.
I happened to be in the Middle East at that moment for the shooting of The Other Son, a film telling the story of an Israeli and a Palestinian family learning that their sons were accidentally switched at birth. Asking the question ‘WHO ARE YOU’ there, while playing myself one of the two sons experiencing an unprecedented identity crisis, took on an even more particular and charged meaning. As always in my life, acting was serving as a bridge.
It’s at that time that I met Frédéric de Goldschmidt, one of the producers of the film, who would later co-produce and host iD chapter I: construction at Cloud Seven, his art center in Brussels.
I kept on traveling the world questioning identity, asking more questions to more people, some were complete strangers, others were friends and acquaintances, digging for answers outside of myself as much as inside. My thirst for answers was still unquenchable in 2016, so I invited artist Shamel Pitts to join me in Belgium and explore what identity meant for us. Moving our minds and our bodies, without knowing what to even look for. But being together in that specific time and place, exploring the findings of great minds on the subject, such as Pasolini, Whitman, Baldwin, was a way of creating space for more understanding.
Then I gradually realized that that unquenchable thirst for answer was a source of healing. Through the mosaïque of people all over the world sitting in front of me answering questions on identity with both much strength and vulnerability, I was finding strength in my own and an echo that would satisfy my thirst for answers.
I also figured out that the awareness that part of our identities is a construct is in itself a relief. By accepting that there is a construct, I could naturally let my true self emerge, slowly, but surely. That’s a step made we can never undo.
Twelve years of researching, encounters and connections, questioning identity put together with this ambitious first chapter, made of installations on two levels and of performances and screenings.
I take much pride in this project because it doesn’t belong to me, but to all of us who participated in it, one way or the other.
In that collectivity, I didn't find one answer, I found many, and that marked the beginning of a healing. In the end, the question ‘WHO AM I?’ was equivalent to the question ‘WHO ARE WE?’.
Mehdi Dehbi
