Out of Place

Overview

In Out of Place, Rizzi follows second-generation emigrants in Paris as they grapple with feelings of displacement. Ordinary moments from the everyday lives of Afghani, Chilean and Palestinian emigrants are pieced together into 3-minute individual portraits that juxtapose their similar experiences. This video installation explores these emigrants’ existence within a gap between two worlds, and in a culturally and psychologically limbic state.

Rizzi eschews a more conventional approach to the portrayal of emigrants’ lives, with its focus on the dichotomy between alienation and integration and the disenfranchised. Rather, he chooses to feature academics and white-collar workers and to explore the ways they meander between two cultural existences. The viewer is invited to decide where to linger and in whose life to delve more deeply.

While attempting to capture the poetics and complexities of everyday life in a multicultural European environment, this work also questions the changing meaning of ‘belonging’ in an increasingly globalised world. The video installation borrows its name from Edward Said’s memoir, in which he revisits his early years in Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt, explores his struggle with identity, and attempts to come to terms with the tension involved in simultaneously being an American citizen, a Christian, a Palestinian and always, therefore, an outsider.