L'Amulette (pour construire un château, il faut un terrain où le mettre)
L’Amulette (pour construire un château, il faut un terrain où le mettre) is the second stage creation by Yasmine Yahiatène. In this new work, she continues to develop the threads of her first piece, La Fracture, while choosing to shift the focus: moving away from frontal exposure to open a space for fiction, poetry, and magic.
To speak about herself, about us, Yasmine chooses to wear a mask. She looks for comfort in stories other than her own, stories written long before her, in order to build her own castle. She erects it on an imaginary land filled with olive trees and lavender, but also with invented flowers, masked characters drawn with magic markers, collected, invented and transformed sounds, archives, and rewound, worn-out, distorted films. Yasmine builds her castle and the world that comes with it by opening the doors of fiction to fill in the gaps. She sets out to visit lands she has drawn herself in order to reconcile with her intimate and political stories.
L’Amulette (pour construire un château, il faut un terrain où le mettre) will take the form of a tale, inspired by those of Mouloud Mammeri, Shakespeare, and the J’aime lire magazines of our childhood. In a civilisation that privileges writing and speech, the piece seeks to reconnect with the invisible and unified dimension of the magical world that surrounds us, the one that oral traditions, peoples of nature, and Kabyle culture have never stopped inhabiting.
On stage, Yasmine invites four performers as well as an artistic team whose life paths intersect through shared experiences of marginalisation. Together, they embrace the idea that their stories are like Swiss cheese: fragmented, full of holes, incomplete. Through poetry and imagination, they collectively choose to repair themselves.
L’Amulette (pour construire un château, il faut un terrain où le mettre) is also about accepting that sometimes silence is golden. That we do not need to put words to everything. That in a violent world, certain silences have protected us and sometimes even saved us. The aim is no longer to break them, but to welcome them and transform them. To turn them into magic.
