Sébastien Kheroufi

Austrian playwright Peter Handke's play Par les villages (1981) is about a writer's return to his home village. The painful reunion is accompanied by the disappearance of the rural world he knew, gradually erased behind the planning and promise of a modern city, prophesied by new industrial sites. In this twilight, where one universe is declining to make space for another, the voices of the “insulted and humiliated” are heard, voices that were once silent. Sébastien Kheroufi makes Peter Handke's words his own: "Did I have to flee to succeed? Have I betrayed my family? How do I get back?" In this way, he transposes the Austrian author's 1960s village to the 1990s suburb where he grew up. 

Building on the initial framework of Par les villages, Sébastien Kheroufi projects another portrait like a shadow, that of the large housing estates in the suburbs of the 1990s: agricultural areas, post-war urban utopias, then confined and isolated spaces, relegated to the pity of public authorities. A careful work of contextualisation was carried out under the knowing eye of Peter Handke himself – which does not give in to the desire for modernisation, but rather opts to show the same process of "sidelining" and "marginalisation" experienced by the inhabitants of the "outskirts". 

"One day someone arrives with a tape recorder and camera on behalf of the authorities, feeling sorry for us, and expects us to feel sorry for ourselves too. But we want people to see us differently. We want to be praised. Better still, our home should be magnified, with its colours and shapes.” Peter Handke, Par les villages, 1981 

Sébastien Kheroufi discovered Par les villages in the early stages of his artistic career. He immediately felt recognised and understood by the Austrian author's prose: "To feel represented with dignity, without pity or caricature. To have the chance to dream of something other than what our social heritage has granted us. This text saved me", he admits.