One Hundred Steps (2020, 30 min) is Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca’s first transnational film -shot in Ireland and France -in collaboration with around 20 musicians and dancers from Ireland, France, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. The eighth audio-visual collaboration of Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca references the work of Bob Quinn, Irish filmmaker whose tetralogy ‘Atlantean’ (1981) was dedicated to deconstructing the Eurocentric hegemonic imaginary by elaborating on the role that North African cultures have played in the formation of Irish culture.

One Hundred Steps invites the viewer to enter its narrative through two distinct and seemingly mirrored chapters. The first is set at a sumptuous 17th century Anglo-Irish colonial manor of the landlord class, located in the South of Ireland, and the latter in a 19th century stately mansion built by a bourgeois French family, located in the center of Marseille, in the South of France. Each of these houses carries the weighted atmosphere of its privileged history in their architecture and décor –a history now preserved and, as both have become museums, open to the public.

One Hundred Steps unfolds through a hybrid language between documentary and fiction. Here, the museum visitors transform into performers, where musical contributions act as ephemeral occupations of these loaded settings, denying a simplified binary relationship between source and extrapolation, or European and Other, pivoting the power relations of who is doing the telling and who must listen. It is in this third territory in which Wagner & Burca’s narrative is established, wherein the voices and bodies of these artists forge new imaginations around set historical narratives.

Commissioned by Manifesta 13 Marseille and VISUAL Centre for Contemporary ArtProduced by VOLTE and Wagner & de Burca, Co-financed by the Arts Council of Ireland, Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (BKM), Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg, V-A-C Foundation and Ammodo.