Native Maqari & Simon Rouby

Simon Rouby studied animated film design in Paris, at École de l’Image, and in Los Angeles, at California Institute of the Arts. His final assignment films were selected at a number of international festivals, including Cannes, Clermont, San Diego, Bucharest, Ottawa and Taiwan. Adama, his first feature film, was nominated at the 2015 César Awards and the European Film Awards as one of the best three animated films of the year. He developed a practice in video installation during a 2016/2017 residency at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Médicis, which he pursed the following year during a residency in the Kerguelen Islands, as a Lauréat of Atelier des Ailleurs.

Born in Zaria, Nigeria, Native Maqari grew up in Brooklyn, where he discovered the underground world of graffiti. Permeated with this urban culture, in 2004 Maqari moved to in Paris, where he joined the avant-garde Collectif 1984 and began to take an interest in installation and painting, while his drawing practice naturally led him to the graphic novel. Publications and exhibitions in Europe and the United States are testimony to the openness and breadth of Maqari’s range, where his choice of medium is strongly influenced by his sense of ethical responsibility.

In 2015 Rouby and Maqari collaborated on Blackout, a monumental video projection to music by Keziah Jones. The project, which explored the delicate balance between migration and work, was presented at the 2017 ¡ Viva Villa ! festival. It marked the beginning of the duo’s collaborative work, which currently ranges from animated film to video installation and performance.

Native Maqari and Simon Rouby collaborated on a research project which took root during a 2018 trip to northern Nigeria. It was here, while organising a self-directed artists’ residency in the Zaria area, that they observed the astonishing similarities between the cultures of Japan and the Sahel, from phonetic compatibilities between languages to warriors’ codes of honour and ceremonial dress. From this, the duo developed a subjective comparative study that was part social science, part fiction.

It was in this context that their research increasingly crystallised around Yasuke, a man of African origin who was the first non-Japanese Samurai in the history of the islands, and whose story could be traced back to the fifteenth century. Their project followed his itinerary in and around the Kyoto area during the feudal era and shed light on his meeting with Oda Nobunaga, one of Japan’s most powerful feudal lords, as the basis for a documentary essay and the scenario for a future animated feature film.

-1 Simon Rouby, Affiche du long-métrage ‘Adam’, Naïa Productions, 2015

-2 Native Maqari, Couverture du roman graphique ‘Jack London’, le Lombard, 2018