Curator and theatre maker Eva-Maria Bertschy talks to filmmaker Abou Bakar Sidibé about the uncertainties of life, what motivates us to keep going, about ambitions and death.
On his journey from Mali to Germany, Abou Bakar Sidibé spent fifteen months at the border fence in Melilla. He documented the fates of the people at the border with his camera, resulting in the award-winning film “Les Sauteurs – Those who jump”. He will accompany this year’s Between Land and Sea festival as a resident artist. Together with the curator and theatre maker Eva-Maria Bertschy and the Palermitan actress Daniela Macaluso, he is beginning to work on a documentary theatre piece about Campobello di Mazara.
Eva-Maria Bertschy: In this edition of the festival we focus on the question of uncertainty. What does that mean to you? To live, act and work in a context where you don’t really know what’s going to happen to you? What are your strategies for dealing with uncertainty?
Abou Bakar Sidibé: We’re always living in uncertainty, in doubt, without knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow. That’s the beauty of life. If we knew what was going to happen tomorrow, we would stop forcing ourselves, working hard, tightening our belts, trying to make our dreams come true and change things. Every day we wake up, we have to tell ourselves that it’s a new day, a new beginning. What haven’t I achieved yet? I’m going to do it today. I’m going to increase my efforts, correct my faults, try to do well, to do even better. I want to succeed at all costs, whether financially or morally. The most important thing is to try to be good to the people around you, to be in harmony with the environment, with yourself, to be strong. If I already knew that in a month I’d be rich, I’d sit at home doing nothing and waiting for the end of the month to arrive.
Eva-Maria: When you look around you in Germany, you see a lot of people who know that they’re going to have an income in their account for the next few months and maybe for the next 30 years. When they’re old, they’ll receive their pension from the state. They have this stability, they have their house, their car and they already know more or less how their life is going to evolve. Don’t you sometimes wish to have more stability in your life?
Abou: I don’t think so. Stability in itself is not stable. You’re always going to want something more. Even if you have everything. Even all the big people in this world, those who have millions, still want to have more. There will always be that little lack in our lives. Even for those who think that in 30 years’ time, they’ll have an income from the state, they’ll be in a well-heated house. These are just probabilities. It’s never 100% certain. In reality, you don’t know whether you’re going to live tomorrow or not. We can always plan ahead. Planning is important. But to say that everything is given! No, no, no. There’s no such thing. We’ll always be in doubt. That’s what keeps us going.
There will always be moments of sadness and worry. If a member of my family needs help and I, with what little income I have, can’t help them. It makes me worry and blame myself. Why couldn’t I help him? It’s that feeling that pushes us to keep going, to do even better.
At the end of the day, there’s always one thing we can’t control: death is divine. No one knows when it will arrive. It can always ruin all your plans. There may be people behind you who will take advantage of it, but you won’t be there any more. And yet you were the main actor who dreamed, who made all those plans, all those efforts. So you see! Nothing’s is given.
Eva-Maria: You lived on Mount Gurugu on the border with Melilla. In what is known pejoratively as a “ghetto”.
Abou: We used to call it a fortune camp… We lived in a fortune camp.
Eva-Maria: It was a radically uncertain environment. You had no protection from the state, you were under police and military attack, you weren’t in a legal situation, you had to fight all the time. Tomorrow you could be dead or you could arrive in Europe. There was a radical doubt about what was going to happen tomorrow. What does it mean to live in such an environment?
Abou: We make the choice to go there without knowing what life is going to be like. Most people arrive thinking that we’re not going to stay long and that we’ll be on the other side in a few days or weeks. It’s a moment of passage. That’s why we’ve stayed there without realising that days, months and years have gone by. To live in a place like this, you have to be prepared for everything, psychologically and physically. You have to expect everything. Going in search of happiness doesn’t mean that when you set out on the path you can have happiness. Happiness comes with pain, with sorrow, with the struggle we wage every day, every moment. Some of us have lost our lives in the middle of the road. They went through a lot and in the end they got nothing. They didn’t achieve happiness. They stayed between these two worlds.
Eva-Maria: When you arrived in Germany, you had to fight for six more years to obtain documents. What has changed since you got them? Is there a kind of security or certainty that has come into your life?
Abou: Since I’ve received my documents, I think the battle is 60% won. Because with the documents you’re already mobile, you can go to any country you want, you can do lots of things, you can work easily. It’s like a key for the house. For a long time I stood outside waiting for someone to arrive with that key. As soon as I can enter the house, it’s up to me to sort things out, to put them in order. How am I going to get organised? What path will I take? What choices will I make? Who will I walk with? How can I avoid losing my ambitions? Because without ambitions, once the door is open, I can stay in the house without organising anything. I’ll be stuck in a limbo.