I’m a child of television. I come from a working-class family in Bordeaux, France, but when I was growing up we had all the American channels — Disney, MTV — and I spent all my time watching them. In all those years, I didn’t see myself reflected in any of the television I consumed. The first time I thought, “Oh, maybe I want to make art, maybe I want to be an artist,” was when I was already in my second year of art school and I realized that I wanted to use television and video game formats to make something that reflected my experience. So, I started re-creating infomercials, reality TV clips, and news clips that were talking about subjects close to me. These forms of video were what I was familiar with — I didn’t know much about cinema.

The first time I went to Marseille, I did a workshop with a group of teenagers in a social center, and together we wrote and made a short film about their neighborhood. The concept was that aliens were coming to the neighborhood, and we wanted to imagine what would happen, and how they would react to it. The kids used a TV broadcast format, with one of the teenagers as the host. At the time, Fox News in the U.S. was using the term “no-go zone” to describe neighborhoods like that one in France, claiming that they were super dangerous and describing the people that lived there like animals. So it was important for me to reuse this type of media but with the voices of local teenagers telling their own stories.

I hope that sometimes my work on projects like this one can change people’s minds, but I’m also very aware that I’m just a little artist doing my own thing — I’m not here to save the world and I know that. It was more about giving a voice to these teenagers.

I’m so happy to hear you say that. As someone of Moroccan-Algerian heritage, I’m continually frustrated by the fact that, in contemporary French art and cinema, we’re either non-existent or we’re given this melodramatic feeling. Pale colors, sepia — this sad aesthetic isn’t me, it’s not my husband, it’s not my brother. It became important to me to create work that actually represents me and other people in my community. We’re not all the same, of course, but we do share similar life and cultural experiences. When I decided I wanted to make art, it was with this in mind.

Making my art accessible is essential. Video is something everyone can connect to — especially now, when social media has made video into a medium everyone can use. And when I reference video games or TV, it’s something that belongs to everyone. It’s not part of an elitist culture. So that’s one side of it. The other reason why using video is so important to me is that, when I was in school, I was one of the very few students from a working-class background and the Maghrebi diaspora. I wasn’t supposed to be there, to be honest — the idea of being in a fine art school wasn’t even a possible reality that I had considered before. And then, when I was there, I felt that they didn’t want me to speak about my identity, my culture, my religion, my French rap or TV references, or really anything that constitutes who I am. It made me want to just do my own thing without interacting with my teachers. I decided that I was going to prove that my culture isn’t a low culture thing — that it can have a place in this French elitist domain even.

Well, I lived in a working-class neighborhood, but as a child and teenager growing up watching rich people on TV, like Paris Hilton in The Simple Life, I was thinking: “This life I have isn’t for me, I want to be rich, I want to be famous.” It’s pretty sad when I think about it now. But to achieve that, I felt I needed to leave my neighborhood and not go to my local high school. I found a high school in the city center of Bordeaux that was offering an applied arts course. I wasn’t even interested in the arts, but it was my only way forward. I told them, “You’re the only school offering this, so you have to take me.” I did pretty well in middle school at the time, so my education advisor pushed for my application.

I was bad at it. Like really, really bad. After graduating, I applied to a lot of schools for design — all of our courses were very design-specific — and I was rejected from all of them because of how bad I was. But after a year, I tried applying again at the Fine Arts School and finally was accepted.

Yes. Mohamed Bourouissa was the first one. I searched “art contemporain cité,” came across his work, and thought, “Wait, what? This is art?” That was the first time I felt it was legitimate to tell my story and to create something of my own. It’s pretty random, but that’s how I became an artist. That was the first time that I had this thought at all — in my second year of art school when I was twenty-two years old.

I watched a lot of reality TV from France like Loft Story and Secret Story, l’Île de la Tentation, and Le Bachelor. I also watched Koh-Lanta and Pékin Express with my family. In the afternoon I would watch all the Disney Channel and MTV shows. And then when my parents went to bed, I would watch a lot of American shows like The Jerry Springer Show.

I was a huge fan of it. It would only play super late at night like most of the American shows. Sometimes I didn’t sleep at all — I would stay up all night watching American TV. There was a French version of it called Ça va se savoir! But it wasn’t as good.

My parents didn’t have a lot of money, but my father spoiled us when it came to video games. We always had the latest console: Nintendo DS, PSP, Xbox. My uncle would then hack and upload all the games for me and my brother.

I would say GTA and COD because I would play them with my little brother. That and Mario Bros. After I grew up, I wasn’t able to buy new consoles, so I went years without playing at all. I’ve just recently restarted, maybe a bit too much. I was playing right before this interview, actually.

Animal Crossing, because I felt like I needed some mental peace. But other than that, I play a lot of story-based adventures and visual novel games. They’re super basic in terms of gameplay but it’s interesting for me to see how the game makers create a scenario or what techniques they use to take someone by the hand and lead them through the story. So, I play a lot of these types of games but in an analytical way.

Yes, exactly. Except for Animal Crossing, which is just for relaxing.

Yes! La Potion was a fifteen-minute film commissioned by Frieze London as part of the BMW Open Studio. The idea was to work with BMW engineers, and so I decided to collaborate with them on a video game, as I had done with Google’s engineers for my film Xenon Palace Championship. Both projects were very fun. La Potion is a video game where the avatar is your own persona — it looks like you, it feels like you, and you have to follow it into different emotional states. First, it’s melancholy, then it’s sadness, and at last, it’s peace. The player helps the avatar go through these different states to find serenity. So, during the film, there’s a relationship created between the player and the avatar and, ultimately, they go on the same journey from a negative mindset to a state of serenity together.

To be honest, no. Whenever I start a new project and write a new character it’s always a lone-wolf man and that’s instinctively the type of character I want to write a story for.

When I was in high school and beginning at the Fine Arts School, I went through a complicated identity crisis because I was, as I said, one of the only Maghrebi students. Everyone else was white and well-off. I often felt like I lost track of who I was and where I was. During my years in art school, I did all this work on myself and about myself — often creating self-portraits — in an attempt to figure out who I was. Once I felt like that was done, I started to open my practice up to considering other people in my community. Then, in Marseille at the workshop I mentioned before, the teenage boys started talking to me about their lives, sharing deeply personal things. I got a sense that this was really unusual for them, and as the workshop went on, I realized that they didn’t have anyone else who they could talk to openly without being judged. They couldn’t tell anyone that they were sad, for example, they couldn’t cry in front of anyone. I had already spent a lot of time building trust with my little brother and making sure he felt he could be super open with me, and I felt this urgency to create a space where these boys could express themselves just as freely — a space that, unlike the rest of French cinema, was not making fun of them. I knew it needed to be a space far from reality. Together, we created a fictional world and journey, based on their real-life experiences where they could exist safely.

To be honest, my work was and is still mostly shown everywhere except France. My first shows were in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium — my work was only shown in France much later. Because they’re still fucking racist and classist here.

Thank you. I’m super sensitive about it and I know I should see that bigger picture more often. But to answer your question about an international audience — that wasn’t really something I thought about at first, at least not until I started to receive messages from non-French people who felt a connection to my work. Suddenly I realized that a lot of the emotions and references in my work are universal. Actually, I think I’m more scared about French people seeing my work than anyone else because critics here have all of these specifically French stereotypes in mind when they encounter work by Arab people.

Damn, it’s been a long time since I heard that word. It’s always hard to process it.

I was so scared about that, even if it doesn’t have the fetichism side to it. I talked to my uncle who is Beur by definition about it beforehand, to see what his reaction would be — I felt it was really important to ask friends and family how they felt about it before I went ahead and used it.

To be honest, I had a burnout last year, so I took some time for myself. And I’m starting, little by little, to get back into work again. I just finished a film, which will be shown in Geneva in a train station on a huge panoramic screen. I’m so nervous to see it on more than my little computer!

Wow, thank you, Sarah.