ARCHIVES 2015 / 81 avenue Victor Hugo (Pièce d'actualité)

The avenue Victor Hugo is one of the fanciest and most prestigious avenues in Paris. In Aubervilliers, however, the street of the same name is home to warehouses, Asian import-export businesses, a few grocery stores, an Aveyronnais restaurant, a café/tobacconist's, and, at number 81, opposite a Chinese shopping centre under construction, an abandoned unemployment office. In August 2014, a group of immigrants moved into the building, after 4 months spent living in the street. The story of eight of them unfolds on the stage, taking us from the neighbourhoods of Abidjan, Ouagadougou, and Dhaka, to the present of the homeless of Aubervilliers and their struggle. Each of them gives us to see and hear a fragment of his or her unique destiny, a story of solidarity and violence in which injustice is answered by cunning, in which the same necessity to survive allows them to overcome the many obstacles they face. Their story of exile and migration unfolds over a number of years and two continents, asking the question of hospitality and of the absolute right to being taken in, which supersedes the law. What place are we willing to give the Other? Under what conditions? And in what circumstances should they live and work?