Author: Valentina Morandi

To get to move the masses within a fake Paris that mixes the centre, the Eiffel Tower and the worst of Chinese mass housing (Sky City), working somewhere between the assault on archetypal symbols, the synchronised swimming girls of the musicals with Esther Williams and the human geometries of Michel Gondry’s electronic music videos, takes years of work and refinement on a precise imagery. To have a view as clear as the one Romain Gavras displays in the music video for Gosh by Jamie XX, one must perfectly master that visual universe, those references and be able to film open spaces as well as closed ones. Which, as it happens, are exactly the skills needed to create a Shakespearean epic of the modern metropolis, a Lord Of The Rings that pits angry suburbia with bandanas over the mouths and tracksuits against police officers in riot gear, in other words Romain Gavras’ next film Athena, which will be on Netflix from 23 September. The apotheosis of his career, pure rage on film.

A conflict on an unprecedented scale, shot as if it were a music video, made up of sequence plans and a creative use of drones within a suburban neighbourhood (namely Athena, in Paris). If there is one thing that Gavras has stated through images throughout his career, it is that the architectural aggressiveness and brutality of those places, buildings and areas, imposed by society on those who have less, has ended up affecting the people who live there. Construction has contributed to creating an angry youth that now gathers around those buildings and draws its rebellious strength from them.

So if there is one object that most represents Romain Gavras’ style, it is the Molotov cocktail. A recurring fetish in his music videos that then became part of the films. The perfect symbol of an artist who founded a contemporary aesthetic centred around the rage of the outcast, the suburbs, social housing and a style of clothing that never imitates official fashion but instead is made up of aggressive elements, jumpsuits, chains, bomber jackets and bandanas. The contemporary Kombat Banlieue that bring urban spaces to life in ways that are both familiar and new. Gavras does not found a new mythology of the suburbs, but elevates the one that already exists, the world of streetwear, of street gestures and attitudes, merging it with the buildings, the poorly kept green areas, the graffiti on the walls, the areas that are empty for no reason and the shacks. Everything contributes to creating anger.

His first music video already had it all, I Believe by Simian Mobile Disco, in which a group of guys with faces, bodies and clothing from the suburbs show off, flaunting their swag and the places they live in as if they owned who knows what refined and attractive places. That world is theirs, it represents them and they represent it. It will be a few years later, with Stress by Justice, that Gavras’ ability to frame characters in a landscape would become clear. In that music video made up of gangs, council houses, jackets that all look the same and logos on the back, nastiness, vandalism, beatings, high-rise buildings and arrogant kids, he takes Kassovitz’s La Haine a step further, because those who come from the banlieue no longer need to look like victims but fight back without a real reason. And there, 14 years ago, there is an insane shot that returns in Athena, of racing cars seen from the side, taken with a high-speed drone.

The bodies, the anger and the naivety of 13-18-year-old kids are Gavras’ real passion. In his imagination they are always trained people (often all dressed alike, as if in uniform), with iron wills and desires, an almost military organisation and no limits in what they are willing to do. Perhaps because he was no different from them. Indeed, it takes a lot to found a collective at the age of 13, Kourtrajmé (French slang verlan for court métrage), with a couple of friends and keep it so active until he was 40. Athena was made with other members of Kourtrajmé (Lady Lj at the screenplay) and Les Miserables, a film from two years ago all about banlieue and resistance, was another product of the collective (directed by Lady Lj and produced by Gavras).

With that kind of knowledge, you can also blow the kids up, as in M.I.A.’s controversial music video Born Free, in which the kids respond to the police in riot gear that are harassing defenceless people, unleashing a bloody desert war that spares the viewer nothing, designed and shot to disturb, with its human parts exploding towards the camera. The city is missing, so a piece is missing, and you can feel it. Born Free has great political nastiness but very little style.

The same will be the case in another video for M.I.A., Bad Girls, also filmed far from the metropolis, which plays ironically with the Arab world by placing dusty cars from the 90s on stretches of paved road in the desert, and women posing as men usually do, holding the typical objects of phallic power and exhibiting an ironic pose of domination on cars that move on two wheels. A pure showcase of petty skills, screeching tires and self-display. People who want to take over the world. But what editing and what drone shots! The world of angry suburban kids is so crucial to his visual references that Gavras even manages to slip them into his commercials, such as the one for the Adidas Is All In campaign, in which he places the ardour of his boys alongside major sports figures, or the one for Powerade, in which the grit of a boxer is shown to be rooted in a childhood of suburbia and beatings.

His mother a film producer and his father an idol of the angry cinema of the 70s and 80s (Costa Gavras, short for Kostantinos Gavras), Romain Gavras grew up in a family with all the right references, where fighting was a topic of discussion at the dinner table. Translating it into a clear and complete aesthetic key was therefore an achievement, that came with No Church In The Wild. It is 2012 and that video for the Jay-Z and Kanye West track with Frank Ocean is the dress rehearsal for Athena. An almost five-minute-long clash between the police and angry kids, edited by choosing the essential parts and set no longer in the desert but finally in the streets. Parisian-like city centre architecture, clean streets to be smeared with tear gas, expensive cars to overturn, high class shop windows being smashed while behind them the mounted police charge as in a medieval fight. After the experiment of Stress, the real Kombat Banlieue was born here, that idea for which the movements of protest and struggle, the clothing choices of the rebels, are all about style, that it is the crucial aesthetic of our time and that style is a form of power. His rebels are not desperate because they don’t look like it and their cheap clothing becomes a uniform.

Meanwhile his feature debut, Our Day Will Come, was already out, the crazy story of an absurd rebellion. A teenager and an adult, both with red hair, rebel against a world that marginalises them for it. It makes no sense (and is not memorable), but it is no coincidence that it comes on when the fighting madness takes over and someone sets a car on fire. It does not get much better with The World Is Yours, the second, somewhat more accomplished film, a gangster comedy that is neither really funny nor is it a real crime film. There, however, there is a shot of the kind few can boast of, the first, in which a group of men stand motionless in a suburban setting, tense, holding a hammer to smash something and waiting for an overground train to pass by so they can do so without being heard. Streetwear, desolation, Maghrebi faces, nastiness and a surge of sound for the wagon’s arrival that corresponds exactly with the start of the furious action: an assault to free a dog (!).

This is the path that leads to Gosh, his most accomplished work before Athena, an electronic musical within the fakest of cities and the most popular and aggressive of the world’s suburbs at the same time. Masses with identical clothes but also identical made-up faces and a crazy way of fitting people into architecture. There are at least a couple of perfect sequences (which not surprisingly involve a drone), the one that move backwards from the face of the video’s protagonist, until he becomes a white dot in a forest of high-rise windows, and then the other, one that alone defines an entire career, in which a group of people move drawing a spiral to perfection and the movement of the drone shows us they are inside the Eiffel Tower (or rather its replica). The people assault the most important locations of cities and make them their own through movement, occupying them with the grace of coordinated dance and the style of clothing but with a manner that is always aggressive.

In Gosh, Kombat Banlieue has no Molotov cocktails and clashes but choreography as a means of appropriating space; in Athena, on the other hand, buildings become towers, bridges become the walls of a medieval city, the various levels of the green areas are caves and escape routes. In a brutal regression, the periphery becomes a pre-civilisation space, a stronghold for defence and counter-attack. When at the end of the first furious 10-minute sequence shot, in which the rebels storm a police barracks, steal their weapons and return to the neighbourhood to barricade themselves in, the drone shoots them with a backward movement that widens the perspective and frames them as feudal lords guarding their empire (and the title ATHENA appears), it is clear that Romain Gavras has understood, and knows how to display without words, the purest essence of audiovisuals: to compress a political concept into a style-based visual allegory.

The sun is setting in Jeddah, which for centuries has been the Red Sea gateway to Mecca. In the northern part of the city, not far from the sumptuous new airport terminal inaugurated in 2019 and next to a currently abandoned plot of land – a rectangle of desert swarmed by pigeons and from which you can see the American consulate – stands a new building: an icy parallelepiped that is an element of discontinuity in a mainly residential neighbourhood. It is Hayy Jameel, the city’s new arts hub.

At this time of the day, the pearly white façade changes colour. As Lebanese architect Wael Al Awar, who designed this building, points out, the gold and blue reflections are unique: “something like this could not happen in Singapore or the United Kingdom”. It is Jeddah’s light, “a special light, which cannot be found anywhere else”. It is the light of an extremely hot sun, which during the day bleaches everything. As it sets into the Red Sea, it casts soft, precious shades.

This ever-changing light is deeply symbolic. It corresponds to the essence of an architecture designed to change over time, remodelling its spaces according to the needs. In the most extreme case, the steel parts – all standard pieces – can be dismantled and reused. “This architecture is not static”, sums up Al Awar, founder of waiwai studio and curator of the UAE pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, which was awarded a Golden Lion.

Jameel is the name of the philanthropic family originally from Jeddah who financed the construction of the building that has become the younger brother of the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. Hayy is the Arabic word for neighbourhood, and it is the name that was chosen for a space aiming to be “accessible, communal and collaborative”, as the official website reads.

However, Hayy Jameel does not explicitly reveal itself to the street and the neighbourhood. “This is a residential area, we couldn’t do otherwise,” says Al Awar, explaining that the building, already taller than the surrounding houses, was designed so as not to invade the privacy of others. It does not offer itself to the eye and at the same time does not allow looking outside. It is a treasure chest full of surprises, but at the same time, it is opaque, designed to be discovered only from the inside.

The only way to ideally see inside Hayy Jameel is through its façade, a 25-metre-long surface which each year will display the work of a different artist, as part of a collaboration with Lexus. Nasser Almulhim, from the capital city Riyadh, gets the ball rolling with a drawing inspired by a local fable about birds in a time of famine.

On either side of the façade, there are stairs leading up to the main courtyard, called Saha. If Hayy Jameel is a neighbourhood, to Al Awar this space is its square – or more precisely, the agora. The challenge, he explains, was to bring its dimensions back to a human scale, whereas urban design in the Gulf countries is car-oriented – his inspiration was the courtyards in Damascus, where the architect was born, or those in Morocco. “But even in Jeddah, we have an example of this kind of scale, that is, in the old city”. He refers to Al-Balad, the historical centre of this metropolis of five million inhabitants that dates back to the seventh century. A spider’s web of alleys and lanes winding between palaces and mosques and bazaars, where citizens and pilgrims have always moved on foot or ridden on camelback.

Saha is a multifunctional place that can be transformed into a small multi-level arena for concerts, a market space, a garden in which to read a book or drink coffee with friends, but above all it was conceived as a place to meet and feel close to people. A human-oriented oasis for the inhabitants of a car-oriented city.

In Hayy Jameel’s 17,000 square metre complex there is room for art residencies, exhibitions and events, performances and workshops, shops and educational platforms, and even a comedy club. And cinema: when the project was conceived, seven years ago, it was a black box. The reason is simple. For thirty years, cinema was banned in Saudi Arabia.

It was designed by Bricklab, a studio founded in 2015 by brothers Abdulrahman and Turki Hisham Gazzaz. “There are no film libraries in the city, there are no archives, so this space was created to be both educational and a landmark for experimentation”, the brothers explain. Born in Jeddah, they recently returned here after studying abroad. Preceded by an installation, Hayy Jameel’s audio-visual centre will open in spring.

During our conversation, Bricklab’s founders gave me a fundamental piece of information to understand their hometown, pointing out that the city’s keywords – following a chiastic pattern – are “art and culture, culture and art”.

The story of the Gazzaz brothers is a very common one here among millennials, or at least among the millennials I happen to meet in the few days I spend in the Saudi city: almost all of them are under 40 and have studied abroad – in Canada, London, Bristol, some in the United States – and have recently come back, bringing an important contribution in terms of knowledge, creativity and energy.

This is also the case of young entrepreneur Tamara Abukhadra, who came back after 18 years in London. In 2014 she founded Homegrown Market, a concept store that brings together the best the Arab world has to offer in terms of fashion design, food and beauty. It is now also a pop-up store inside Hayy Jameel. “I am honoured to be part of such a creative community,” says Abukhadra with genuine enthusiasm during our chat over lunch. Unlike many of the women here, wrapped up in the traditional black abaya, she is not wearing a hijab, but a colourful dress that is overtly local but globally Arab. She tells me about the life of young people in Jeddah, how the central area of the city is mostly inhabited by the older generations, while the young people prefer to live in the northern area, where the new trendy neighbourhoods are – and where her shop is.

Here, she explains, social life is organised mainly through invitations between friends on WhatsApp or via e-mail. “There are no clubs, only cafés. The parties are all private, organised at home”. It’s perfectly normal for them to be men-only or women-only. Sometimes there is also alcohol. She then mentions the parties in the desert, which are freer, but they are all outside Riyadh, on the other side of this vast country.

During one of my many trips around this city, where there is no metro and public transport in general has remained a sort of urban legend for me, partly due to my unfamiliarity with the Arabic language, I end up sitting next to a French government official who has been working for years on important collaborations between museums in Cisalpine and Gulf countries, such as the Louvre in Abu Dhabi or the Pompidou in AlUla.

The official roughly sums up the reforms introduced by the young prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud – also known as MBS – thanks to which Saudi Arabia is rapidly changing. They mainly concern the rules that relegated women to a position that we Europeans like to summarily define as ‘medieval’, from the dress code (now gone) to work (now women can do any job they want). It tells of the optimism of a country that is changing, opening up to international tourism. But also of what happens in Deera Square, the so-called Riyadh “chop chop square”, where the heads of criminals, opponents and homosexuals are cut off; of all the times he entered a club and those inside, seeing a European enter, decided to leave. He tells me of the 2007 attack against a group of French tourists, and more recent episodes.

A few weeks after my visit, Mayeul Barbet, a French Paris-Dakar rally driver, was the victim of an attack right here in Jeddah. The moral dilemma, according to the French official, is whether to disregard what is happening around here, or to stay here “to make things better”. On the other hand, the petrodollars of the Saudi family, the richest rulers in the world, are a very strong attraction for countries like France (or Italy), where culture is one of the last relevant economic assets that can be exploited on a global scale.

In Jeddah, a multicultural city in terms of both history and vocation, there is certainly great optimism about the reforms brought about by MBS. The locals seem enthusiastic about the future, which is almost overwhelming. But outside the Kingdom, this is still the country of Khashoggi, the dissident journalist murdered in Turkey (probably) by Saudi agents, as well as the country where Lewis Hamilton won the first Formula 1 Grand Prix, held in Jeddah, wearing a Pride flag helmet as a slap in the face to the Saudi system. “Do I feel comfortable here? I wouldn’t say I do,” the Mercedes driver commented before the race.

A few days after the Grand Prix, you could still catch a glimpse of the podium as you strolled along the Jeddah Corniche, between the recently renovated waterfront and a Starbucks. Without knowing the context, you could mistake it for one of the many statues that dot the city, many of them being odd, others beautiful, some a masterpiece. Almost all of them are located in the middle of the many roundabouts that mark the road network of this metropolis-highway, or along the junctions where, for a few moments, solitary human beings locked inside air-conditioned cabins approach each other before speeding on straight roads.

The statues are the legacy of the ambitious public art operation launched by Mohammed Said Farsi, the mayor who, by inviting masters such as Joan Mirò, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Alexander Calder and Henry Moore in the 1970s, was the first to bring Western art and sculpture to an Arab city. “It left Jeddah a surreal cityscape of desert monuments that might have delighted JG Ballard,” wrote Jonathan Jones in 2015 on the Guardian.

To understand how Jeddah has grown and changed since the oil boom, I visit Saudi Modern, Bricklab’s initiative to document the unforeseen urban and architectural evolution of Saudi Arabia in the decades after 1938 – a date that counts as year zero in the Kingdom. The venue is a two-storey house across a street where a sink is mounted on the outside of a boundary wall, an almost surreal detail. In a room, a map and a large-scale model illustrate the expansion of Jeddah, a metropolis squeezed between the sea and the desert, and one can clearly see how the intricate network of streets in the old city, whose proportions now look like those of a postage stamp, unravels a divergent system of orthogonal grids, very similar to those of American cities, which with their wide grids characterise today’s urban fabric.

The exhibition focuses on a period going up to the early 1960s, the time of the first big boom, but it is clear that today this city is once again undergoing a major transformation. During my conversation with Al Awar, the architect points out that when the project for Hayy Jameel was conceived seven years ago, Jeddah had 4 million inhabitants. In 2024, it will be 7 million. But it is not just a matter of numbers. This is where the world’s tallest tower will be built, where more than $200 million was spent to create a waterfront that would become a fairytale backdrop for tourists’ Instagram pics. And in the days following Hayy Jameel’s inauguration, the new Red Sea Film Festival has brought Jeddah back in the international film scenario. Not to mention the events dedicated to contemporary art, the Bienal Sur for example, the many fairs such as Shara or 21,39 Jeddah Arts, plus everything that happens in the already lively circuit of galleries scattered throughout the city.

The Hayy Jameel cultural hub and its architecture are both a reflection and an integral part of this ferment and transformation. “A place to coexist”, defined it Antonia Carver, director at Art Jameel. The building represents what Jeddah is in actuality and potentiality. It reflects it symbolically, and it shows what it would like to look like. It does so without frills, without vainly presenting itself with the ambition of being a cover landmark, but with a genuinely Islamic modesty. And an optimism that can only be exotic to my European eyes.

Hayy Jameel’s opening saw the inauguration of the exhibition “Illuminate”, with 11 large installations by Saudi artists dedicated to light, “Staple: What’s on your plate”, in which the exploration of food becomes an opportunity to get to know different cultures and artistic practices, and “Paused Mirror”, with portraits of Saudi artists taken by Syrian photographer Osama Esid that follow each other in different parts of the building. And there is also “Red Sea: immersive”, the virtual reality section of the Red Sea Film Festival.