France

Mata Malam

Address: Mata-Malam, Le Bourg, 33710 SAMONAC / FRANCE

Status: NGO / Nonprofit organization

Tel / fax:/

Mata Malam is a theatre and video filming company.

We work internationally to defend the values of a living theatre as a tool for raising the awareness of humanity, of the human state of being. It is the desire and a constant ambition of the theatre to seek out those who are seeking to realise these goals.

The theatre was conceived, within living memory, to create a link between past and future, and to honour the present while reflecting upon the values of tolerance.

How to restore the “active” memory in our current interactions? What is our connective link today? In which ways does it help us to live as the best we can be? These are our driving questions.

Our latest project is called The Incredible Citizens (LIC). It involves artistic collaborative and participative creation as a tool of citizenship, a new modus operandi, so that artists and civil society would share their skills and magnetize the movement of public participation in the European decision-making in a playful and serious way. It raises the question of how to co-create a performance of the country of arrival based on articles of law and constitution which allows us to approach numerous societal questions (borders, migration, memory, and evolution of the laws, the laws of food-processing industries, religious laws and civil laws, gender equality, copyright and public property, labour laws, laws yet to be drafted) – and answers: by singing, dance, music, video, text, all in several languages, and open to future participants (individuals or countries).
Mixing politics with poetry, LIC introduces spaces of direct democracy, by organizing creative and other workshops; creates opportunities to compare the laws and several constitutions of the partner countries, European and other; creates opportunities to build, to exchange, and to create a new shape of performance that is multi-lingual, interdisciplinary, and intersectional, as well as a new shape of text – all products of this European artistic and civic initiative.

The public is going to be invited to contribute in various stages of the project. Public feedback is going to take place at the end of every event of co-creation (partner artists, representatives of the civil society, public-oriented movements), including workshops with the public (local, student, vulnerable young artists, migrants, women).
The project is going to offer: an evolutionary play, an online collaborative video diary, short movies on participative democracy, a publication of university study, a comic strip, a dictionary of 100 words of open-mindedness, and a methodology of the innovative creative process to be decided by and with others and with other countries.