The Speeches Series is a video trilogy produced from 2012 to 2013. The trilogy forms a video installation, composed of three digital films: Mother Tongue, Words on Streets, and Living Labour. Each digital film focuses on a specific question: Mother Tongue on language and resistance, Words on Streets on citizenship, and Living Labour on immigrant working-class.
Shot in Paris and its suburbs, Genoa, and New York, respectively, Mother Tongue, Words on Streets, and Living Labour are for each constructed around five different short portraits, in which human body, voice, language, and speech, are articulated to provide with a singular perspective, aiming to articulate a collective voice. Embodiment and self-empowerment are approached as both a poetical and political act, in which language plays a major role. Based on a precise methodology, the project avoids simple interviews, in favor of a collaborative process.
Mother Tongue, the first chapter, is elaborated as a “discourse on method”, inviting the five participants in the project to choose, translate, and memorize a text to recite, among them, texts by Edouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, and Mahmoud Darwish.
From there, Words on Streets and Living Labour operate a transition from appropriation to subjective speeches authored, memorized, and delivered, by the participants
Relying on a specific visual lexicon, anchored in the history of modern avantgarde film as embodied by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Khalili’s cinematic practice relies on static and precise shots, using a Brechtian distancing effeyt to avoid sentimentalitu, to approach orality as an expression of the critical function of subjectivity, as well as an invitation made to the audience to exercise critical self-reflection.