UN HOMME ENGAGÉ Attracted from a very young age by “everything pertaining to the visual,” David Constantin drafts, through painting and film, a picture of Mauritius that profoundly questions what it means to be human in a world where pressurising forces abound. Très tôt « attiré par tout ce qui touche à l’image », David Constantin trace, en peinture et au cinéma, une photographie d’une île Maurice qui interroge profondément le rapport de l’humain aux pressions du monde qui l’entoure. BY SHENAZ PATEL PHOTOGRAPHS KARL AHNEE Perceived as somewhat of a UFO,” David Constantin was only a teenager when he set up, in middle school, a cinema club so he “could watch movies during recess”. With Kenneth Noyau, whom he came to consider as a mentor, he later went on to take pictures for several in-company magazines – a defining experience, which granted him unprecedented access to the world of workers, factories, dust, noise, and faces marked by the reality of minoritised lives. In 1997, David turns 23 and leaves to study cinema at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Audiovisuel in Toulouse, a time he remembers as being “deeply freeing”. Once reluctantly back in Mauritius, in 2002, he engages in another activity parallel to that of cinema: painting. This is an old acquaintance, one he owes to his father, Serge, a renowned painter. Indeed, as a child, he would tag along with the small group of Serge’s students and friends on their weekly painting sessions through the streets of Port-Louis, the capital. If painting and cinema first grew as two distinct entities, David Constantin readily admits today, at nearly 50 years old, that he would like to make the two meet. “I would like to set up an exhibition meant to be experienced as a movie,” he says, with a red thread stemming from his current place of residence, Belle Étoile. “This used to be the countryside – now, we’re in the city.” THE HUMAN ELEMENT Throughout the years, David Constantin’s work has dug a consistent furrow: one that explores the fast-paced transformation of his island, taking place in a movement so deft and “deaf” that it only underlines the helplessness of individuals faced with the steamrolling force of “development”. Steering clear of misplaced nostalgia, he is on the lookout for what becomes of human beings in a laboratory-island: how individuals fight back and strive to live amid latent violence at a local and general scale. In 2014, with Lonbraz Kann, his first full-feature film, he portrayed the upheaval undergone by characters strongly anchored in a sugar cane-based environment set to give way to a land development project at the benefit of rich expatriates. In Simin Zetwal (Staring at the Stars) in 2022, he took the audience through a journey at once realistic and dream-like in the steps of the following generation, caught between need and the desire to leave behind the very land that had stopped providing for their parents. His documentaries, Diego l’interdite (2002), Grat lamer pintir lesiel (2021) and Sorry for the Inconvenience (2023), also tell stories of attachment and exploitation. Set back-to-back, what we get is a remarkable and contemporary picture, not of a country itself, but of the people that are its very sap and anchor. This authenticity and universality have earned him many international distinctions, beyond a country still currently struggling with acceptance of its own image. David Constantin A COMMITTED MAN “ THROUGHOUT THE YEARS, DAVID CONSTANTIN’S WORK HAS DUG A CONSISTENT FURROW. THAT OF AN ISLAND THAT IS RAPIDLY CHANGING.
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