Nabil Aniss
Nabil Aniss
Nabil Aniss lives between Brussels and Meknès, Morocco, where he was born. His work explores bodies in movement, metamorphosis, and trance as vehicles for liberation from systems of oppression. "Dancing Animals" is a project he is developing around the mystical rituals of his hometown, while seeking their resonance within other political and cultural spaces. His residency combines research, sound and video editing toward the creation of a sound and image installation centered on animal movements as performative practices.
At Providenza, I met Deicy Sanches, a Cape Verdean dancer and filmmaker.
We spoke about the Gnawa. We spoke about Cape Verde. About slavery. About mysticism.
The same question kept returning.
What remains, when everything has been taken?
The land. The language. The name.
The body remains.
The voice remains.
Norman Ajari writes that dignity is not a right. It is something to be won. A struggle against a world organized around humiliation.
Afro-pessimist thinkers remind us of something else.
Slavery is not behind us.
It continues to shape the present.
So the body no longer merely dances.
It resists. It sings. It trembles. It falls. It rises again.
Mysticism is no longer an escape.
It is a way of enduring.
I am two, one body and one spirit, the world and the other.
This sentence, spoken by Pierre, a mazzeru filmed in 2011 by filmmaker Anne de Giafferri for her documentary Mauvais rêves, encapsulates the very essence of my research during the residency at Providenza.
It also expresses the core of what I have been exploring for the past decade through the Gnawa,
a community in Morocco whose history is rooted in the trans-Saharan slave trade of the fourteenth century.
The other. Death. The beginning. The return.
The mazzeri, like the Gnawa, are intercessors. Between day and night. Between the visible and the invisible. On the threshold of two worlds. At their boundary. At their point of passage.
The intercessors.
The beings of crossing.
They dwell in places of crossing: bridges, mountain passes, watercourses, the pozzi.
Places of passage where the andati converge. The trails traced by wild boars. The places where the greatest number of animal paths meet.
A place of choice, and of encounter with destiny.
They are also found along ridgelines, and at the sociopolitical boundaries of villages. By rivers. Within transitional spaces. In zones of conflict between worlds.
They belong to borderlands. To the places where light gives way to darkness.
Stationed at the edge of transformation, they appear as beings of the threshold.
People who possess a power. Who fulfill a function.
The ability to become two. The ability to become other.
The mazzeri, like the Gnawa, are recognized by their gaze. They do not look at you. They look through you. They spend their lives looking.
And this act... as ordinary as it seems, to look, suggests that they already carry others within themselves.
It is said that the chosen mazzeru becomes absent.
He carries this state of sadness,
perhaps because he knows himself to be the unwitting instrument of death.
This condition between life and death. This in-between space inhabited by the marginalized, the abandoned,
They are neither in a condition where their death is necessary, nor in one where their well-being matters.
This state of indifference.
Of indistinction between life and death.
And do the intercessors resolve this indifference?
I am two, one body and one spirit, the world and the other.
This sentence reveals something else...
For once the animal has been killed, the mazzeru turns it onto its back.
It is then that he sees the animal's head transform into the face of someone he knows,
someone who belongs to his own social world.
The person he recognizes will inevitably die within three days to one year.
The mazzeru may also take the form of an animal when encountering a human being, thus assuming the role of a guide into the other world.
The sacrificial act is fundamental to the intercessors.
The animal helps one become aware of death. A symbolic death.
This is where my interest begins.
It is not the passage. Passage is linear. What interests me is the return.
What matters is not entering the invisible world. It is coming back from it.
The return from the invisible world.
Its capacity to shape the body, the mind, or illness,
but also the social order, domination,
marginalization.
It allows those on the margins to renegotiate their place within society.
The return does not merely transform a body. It transforms a way of inhabiting the world.
It is from this return that the question of THE OTHER emerges.
To look into the face of a stranger as the intercessors do is a demanding act.
It allows one to perceive the different layers of oneself.
The stranger.
In the Sufi lexicon, al-gharīb and al-ghurba refer to exile. To the condition of being.
For the intercessors, the strange and the stranger hold something wondrous.
They draw them away from origin. They draw them away from the obvious.
The possibility of the other is necessary if one is to speak, even about oneself.
The intercessors do not look upon the other with pity. They seek to save no one.
They have understood that goodness
is not confined to their own existence.
They are capable of becoming another.
Because they have understood that they have no choice.
There can be neither morality nor goodness if the other is not a question one asks of oneself.
Even if everyone ignores the intercessors,
they are responsible for us.
They concern us.
Whether we want it or not.
They entangle us.
Whatever we may say.
Whatever we may do.
They leave us no choice but to abandon indifference.
They take from us the two things we cling to most:
rivalry,
revenge.
To be dispossessed of oneself while remaining responsible for others
is not a wound.
It is this dispossession that makes death more gentle.
Anxiety for the other is the ultimate emotion.
More than love. More than friendship. More than compassion.
It allows us to break free from the impersonal. From the tragedy of birth.
Anxiety for the other is a form of rescue.
To inhabit this in-between space between life and death
is to say:
dignity or death.
Within this way of thinking, there is no absolute opposition between life and death.
One can pass from one to the other.
The dead are among us.
And we are among the dead.
This way of relativizing death is a revolutionary force.
An extraordinary capacity for survival and resistance.
And this is dignity.
A collective power that endures.
A power that withstands humiliation.
And that carries, in the same movement,
the tragic reality of the situation.
It is a response to general indifference.
A kind of aristocracy of the pariahs.
We must recognize, in this act of claiming death as one's own,
perhaps the most progressive gesture we have witnessed.
It is the one thing that can never be offered to us for purchase.
Everything today depends upon constant,
endless growth.
To imagine the end, continually,
is to resist that.
One of the most influential currents of thought today, Afro-pessimism,
begins with a simple observation:
Nothing can transform the world except the end of the world.
The end of a world.
Like Aimé Césaire, returning to his native island in 1936 after his studies in Paris, who wrote:
We must begin.
Begin what?
The only thing in the world worth beginning:
The End of the world, by God.
The end of a world.
Credits
Portrait : Doriane
Photographs : stills from Agonie by Nabil Aniss - 2026 - 16:24