Crocodile time
Oh the beautiful days! 2024
Interview with Mathieu Belezi and Kamel Khélif, hosted by Sonia Déchamps.
Mathieu Belezi continues his interest in the history of Algeria, with a new episode from the early days of French colonization, a little-treated period he had already explored in 2022 in his fine Attaquer la terre et le soleil (Prix littéraire Le Monde 2022 and Prix du Livre Inter 2023).
In the middle of the 19th century, when France’s conquest of Algeria is well underway, the all-powerful Captain Vandel leads a detachment of French soldiers to conquer the desert with no qualms about his “superior race” credentials. Enraged, the battalion of a hundred Zephyrs plunder, rape, torture and slit throats with a barbarity that seems limitless. Mathieu Belezi’s writing spares no bloodthirsty detail, in a language as raw as it is poetic, admirably chiselled and iterative, sublimated by the drawings of the great Kamel Khélif.
In a palette of browns and grays, using a painting technique he invented, the artist conjures up landscapes both obscure and grandiose that survive the rampage, somewhere between Goya-style paintings and Western images.
The two authors will continue this fruitful artistic dialogue on stage, while some of Kamel Khélif’s drawings will be projected.
Co-produced with Mucem.
To read
Le Temps des crocodiles, Mathieu Belezi and Kamel Khélif, Le Tripode (2024).
Interview with Mathieu Belezi and Kamel Khélif, hosted by Sonia Déchamps.
Mathieu Belezi continues his interest in the history of Algeria, with a new episode from the early days of French colonization, a little-treated period he had already explored in 2022 in his fine Attaquer la terre et le soleil (Prix littéraire Le Monde 2022 and Prix du Livre Inter 2023).
In the middle of the 19th century, when France’s conquest of Algeria is well underway, the all-powerful Captain Vandel leads a detachment of French soldiers to conquer the desert with no qualms about his “superior race” credentials. Enraged, the battalion of a hundred Zephyrs plunder, rape, torture and slit throats with a barbarity that seems limitless. Mathieu Belezi’s writing spares no bloodthirsty detail, in a language as raw as it is poetic, admirably chiselled and iterative, sublimated by the drawings of the great Kamel Khélif.
In a palette of browns and grays, using a painting technique he invented, the artist conjures up landscapes both obscure and grandiose that survive the rampage, somewhere between Goya-style paintings and Western images.
The two authors will continue this fruitful artistic dialogue on stage, while some of Kamel Khélif’s drawings will be projected.
Co-produced with Mucem.