90’ video installation
90’ video still 131', Tunis, 2016
90’ is a one-shot video capturing the interior of a 'men-only café' in Tunis. It features a group of men gazing towards a camera placed atop the café's television, which is tuned to a European Champions League football match. This same video was also screened in 2019 in a similar café’s TV at Gabès during the GCF Festival.
Screening of 90’ at “El Kazma",
Gabès Cinéma Fen 2019, Gabès, Tunisia.
About 90’:
90’ is a video recording, shot from a low-angle perspective, capturing a group of men intensely focused in a café in Tunis. The object of their gaze is undefined, no sound is audible, but it is easy to deduce—given the length of the video—that they are watching a football match being broadcast from the same angle as the camera. This video is not intended for traditional screening or regular viewing. Instead, it was shown in a setup designed to extend the questioning of collective gazes that it provokes, through a reversal: one television broadcasting the video was placed in counterpoint to another showing a live football match. This created an experience of critical observation, where the collective male gaze—far from passive—was observed both in its formation and disintegration over time.
This counterview of the sporting spectacle becomes a study of the workings of a strictly masculine collective formation, observed over the duration. Ultimately, with 90’, Intissar Belaid's images say nothing and belong to her no more than they belong to anyone else: they simply show. What do they show? The reverse of what is seen: the gaze. Its conditions, its configurations, its uncertain possibilities.
from Robert Bonamy's "Intissar Belaid, rester radical (en douce)" for the periodical Incertains Regards (2019)