Louisa Babari

My project will involve a field survey in New York, which will later serve as the basis for writing a fiction narrative and creating a multimedia piece (sound installation, video, and photographs). Entitled A Risk of Confusion, my project recounts the New York-based encounter of Daria, a woman of Russian origin, and Karim, a Russian mafia henchman.

I will play the first-person overseer of the story through Daria’s voice, carrying out my field work to inspire a fictional dialog with Karim Aliev in New York, which will call forth two accounts and experiences that will both reveal further chronicles of individuals and communities in the city.

The story’s title alludes to the confusion that arises from living in a sprawling metropolis at the crossroads of history, territory, and identity – the confusion that besets the characters in their ability to integrate into new worlds, close themselves off to old ones, and live and think in a foreign language in an American city.

A Risk of Confusion narrates personal experiences, encounters, and events along with social, professional, and romantic relationships. With this in mind, my stay in New York will be an opportunity to meet a network of contacts who come from and/or are connected to these communities.

For this, I will conduct a series of interviews, make audio recordings of interviews and radio shows, write texts, and take photographs. This fiction- and documentary-led approach will address a number of questions. What, for instance, are the ways in which we belong to one culture and try to join another? How do we coexist with the memory of conflict, trauma, prejudice, and discrimination? How are we shaped by capitalist social and political violence, and the mafia networks that it engenders? How can we deploy strategies of resistance against domination, prejudice, and subjugation?

Part text, part score, A Risk of Confusion will give rise to a multimedia piece where literary creation to be conceived of as a succession of cover versions, a continuous chain of “works or narratives” wherein each individual draws from the last while simultaneously developing their own originality. This will therefore be a project at the crossroads of several disciplines and forms of creation.

My project will take place in New York. Its main characters, Daria et Karim, meet each other as a result of this city. Karim settled there several years earlier. Daria is a visitor renewing her ties to a city that she first came to know in the 1990s. To inform my fictional dialog, I will conduct a field investigation by meeting with people from the Russian and/or Soviet community in New York. I would like to reconnect to the terrain and extend my research beyond the networks and contacts that I have already encountered.

The narrative paints the picture of a New York detached from reality, just as the characters are detached from their continent. My project infiltrates a city in chiaroscuro, a land of extremes and contradictions. It is a city “interworld” (to borrow from Edward Said), a touchstone of immigration, dreams, success, and shattered hopes. The theme of territorial tethering or descent occupies a complex place in my practice, since, for me, it means having multiple sources, upsetting the notions of belonging, empowerment, using experience and “I” as my starting point, all within a multitude of antagonisms.

The city of New York fits these expectations, given its ability to pinpoint what America is all about while blurring its most obvious outlines. The contradiction of distance and proximity that operates in New York between the two characters in my story pushes them to the very edge, both of themselves and of the city. As they wander the streets, bars, and restaurants in downtown Manhattan, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, or Queens—antechambers of their desires and doubts—signs emerge, pointing to the territory’s spatial limits, a danger, a natural disaster, and, unknowingly, the end of their relationship.

In this sense, A Risk of Confusion will form an introspection, asking questions that Americans ask themselves in a context of pandemic, social violence, and economic crisis.