Caricole
—
2018
Film HD, colour, sound, format 16×9, 07 min.
The video film Caricole takes its name from the Belgian transit centre for undocumented migrants. It is built around the anonymous testimony of a young Guinean woman: T.D. She tells us about her migratory journey: her arrival in Belgium, her application for asylum, the authorities’ refusal to grant her a residence permit, her life in an irregular situation, her arrest and imprisonment in the Caricole centre with a view to her deportation.
Rather than hearing and seeing the young woman testify, we read her story through the film’s subtitles. Her voice has disappeared. It has been transformed by computer software into a score for a music box. This soft and elegiac melody is a metaphor, that of a young woman who finds herself invisible in a detention centre, literally faceless, just like the thousands of other undocumented migrants living in the same conditions in Europe.
The image and the testimony both scroll in a slow, long zoom out. The video begins with a close-up of a little blac
