The Mad Man's Laughter

The artist, filmmaker, and archivist Alaa Mansour lives between Marseille and Beirut, and her work focuses on the history of violence and the power of images in the era of necropolitics. In her proposal for st_age, The mad man's laughter (2021), she reflects on the phenomenon of the industrialization of death based on the murder on October 16, 2020, of teacher Samuel Paty in France for showing caricatures of Muhammad in class to discuss freedom of expression. This terrible event sparked numerous reactions and hate speech towards Islam, bringing back to the table some issues that remain unresolved to this day. Using archival material and computer-generated images, sounds, and texts, Mansour navigates the latent and visible spaces of violence generated by the production of colonial-militarist images and the data used to generate algorithmic biases.