or 40 years of a voluntarily catastrophic immigration and prison french policy in an explosive post-colonial context.

Produced in the immediate aftermath of the January 2015 attacks in Paris, Denial takes as its point of departure the slogan that was massively circulated in the public sphere: “Je suis Charlie.” Rather than repeating it as such, the work shifts it by adding the words “and Muslim,” in order to make visible those who, while having nothing to do with these crimes, would nonetheless bear their very real political, symbolic, and social consequences.

The video shows the mechanical repetition of this phrase, embroidered onto a white T-shirt until the surface becomes saturated, to the point that the shape of France begins to appear. As the inscription accumulates, the slogan ceases to function as a simple statement of identification and instead becomes the symptom of a broader climate: that of a country marked by conflation, the denial of structural causes, and the reactivation of a postcolonial racism that was already at work.

Denial therefore does not respond only to the attacks themselves, but also to the way they were immediately absorbed into a consensual narrative of national unity, the abstract defense of free speech, and moral shock, leaving in the shadows the political and social forms of violence that had already structured the situation. The work does not oppose “Charlie” to “Muslim”; it forces them to coexist within the same sentence in order to bring back to the surface what consensus was already trying to keep at a distance.