Vies minuscules, des vies à la Bpi

Designed with the artists Mehdi Meklat and Badroudine Saïd Abdallah, this program runs from 4 to 22 November. It offers a continuous installation combining the videos-performances of Bouchra Khalili, Sara Sadik and Redacted Cut, as well as the intimate podcast of Mehdi Ahoudig. In parallel, the author Jane Sautière settles in residence to ask the public about the meaning of success.

Born in 1992, Mehdi Meklat and Badroudine Saïd Abdallah are artists. They write together since high school, inventing a common language, from the report (When it was necessary to leave, ARTE, 2015 and Tomorrow the fire, 2020) to the novel through the cinema (One against the other, 2025). Since 2021, they also bring to life the artistic program of the Chichas de la pensée. Their first two novels, Burn out and Minute, were published by Le Seuil. Their third novel, Young and Ambitious, has just been published by Editions Tumulte.

Continuous programme

Burn My Letters – Collective installation and listening to the podcast Burn My Letters

Love letters written by a woman to her young love... Words forgotten and rediscovered, several years later, by their son, Mehdi. With Burn My Letters (2026), the documentary filmmaker Mehdi Ahoudig exposes the fragments of his family history, in a podcast produced and broadcast by Arte Radio. For the first time, the broadcast of the documentary is accompanied by the exhibition of his parents’ letters, like a direct dive into an intimate and family memory.

Khtobtogone de Sara Sadik, 2021

A strange world, between video game and self-narrative. With Khtobtogone (2021), Sara Sadik imagines a crossing where desire, identity and popular culture mingle. A video to watch as one enters another world: that of the imaginary and dreams of a generation.

Speeches – Chapter 1 by Bouchra Khalili

In Mother Tongue (2012), the protagonists recite passages of political, literary or poetic texts from Aimé Césaire, Abdelkrim Al Khattabi, Malcolm X, Mahmoud Darwish, Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau. They say them from memory, in front of the camera, in their mother tongues (Moroccan Arabic, Dari, Kabyle, Malinke and Wolof). The people involved were found, explains Bouchra Khalili, thanks to a mixture of research and chance encounters, without casting, simply because they wanted to participate in the film. This questions the status of films (and those who take part in them), somewhere between performance, documentary revelation and collaboration.

RNG Vol.1 and Vol.2 from Redacted Cut

Love, money, success... For fifteen minutes, a series of TikTok videos, made and edited by the artist Redacted Cut, invite ordinary, twisted, obsessive stories to the Bpi. Stories of tiny lives sublimated by these images of the internet, between confidences, humor, solitude and dreams of greatness.

What is success? – Résidence de Jane Sautière

Throughout this exceptional programming, the writer Jane Sautière settles down at the Bpi and asks readers, visitors, passers-by: “What is a successful life?” A simple, dizzying question, to which everyone can answer with his story, his renunciations or his desires.

Phrases read by Lyna Khoudri

Three to five times a day during the Sunday 22 November, the voice of the actress Lyna Khoudri pops into the spaces of the library and whispers sentences around the notion of “Tiny Lives”. From Annie Ernaux to Mafia K’1 Fry, these short texts, imagined as breaths, will be broadcast in the middle of the usual announcements of the library.

Meetings and workshops are also scheduled throughout the period: opening night, screening with the director Claire Simon, fanzine writing workshop: find out more!