| | Les Grandes Aventures d’Achmed (Achmed’s Wonderful Adventures)
A small man with a dark moustache is standing in a wide snow-strewn landscape. He is wearing sunglasses with yellow lenses, a dark blue bonnet and a white and blue tracksuit with purple, green and pink trimmings. In his left hand he is carrying a large red shopping bag with “Dirk”* written on it in large white letters. The colourful man stands alone in the white landscape. This could be an emblematic image of the asylum seeker in the Netherlands, a striking representation of the problem of integration. But nothing is what it seems in the project, entitled Les Grandes Aventures d’Achmed (Achmed’s Wonderful Adventures), a series of short films and photo works by the figurative artist/cineaste Patrick Gofre. And Achmed is far from being what he might seem to be.
At first sight, the ‘wonderful adventures’ of Achmed – the ‘hero’ of the story – are of a rather mundane nature. A number of photographs portray him at the market where, for instance, he grasps the fruit before buying it. In the short film Achmed fait ses emplettes (Achmed goes shopping) we follow him on his way to what he believes to be a supermarket, but it turns out to be an art exhibition. As soon as he attempts to grab the wares laid out there, a voice addresses him in firm tones and he retreats hastily to a real supermarket.
Thus we see a series of ‘days in the life’ of this immigrant. Achmed’s intentions in all of this remain somewhat mysterious. Sometimes they seem innocent enough – but then we see something that is unmistakably suspicious. In the short film Achmed à la frontière (Achmed at the border) we see him at the Belgian border attempting to declare to Customs the fresh Dutch kale in his shopping bag.
From time to time Achmed fills us at least with suspicion, but it is difficult to place the man. Though perhaps at first sight he seems to be a ‘typical’ foreigner, a second look reveals him with far less clarity: his bonnet closes at the back like a baseball cap; his tracksuit – of the campsite/evening dress type – is one more usually associated with the native plebeian; moreover it turns out to be no more than half a campsite/evening dress suit, because over the trousers he is wearing a professional cyclist’s jersey resembling the sort of tracksuit jacket worn by rappers. When dressing Achmed, Gofre plays with all kinds of clichés about the external appearance of both the immigrant and the native in the Netherlands.
A not insignificant detail is that the artist himself plays the part of Achmed. Patrick Gofre is a visual artist of French origin who lives and works in Friesland (province of the Netherlands). Thus on various levels he is aware of thinking in terms of ‘foreigners’ and ‘native inhabitants’.
In the adventures that Achmed has, Gofre introduces the continuous stream of Dutch media reports about foreigners, hatred of immigrants, our feelings of insecurity, crime and the taking of the law into our own hands. The “Dirk” bag in the film Achmed fait ses emplettes refers, for example, to some episodes of violence that occurred in supermarkets. The fact that Achmed tries to declare kale to the customs officers recalls the – in itself hilarious – incident at the Belgian border where dried kale was seen as drugs.
With his Achmed’s Wonderful Adventures the artist draws particular attention to the overheated tones used when discussing the problems of integration in the Netherlands. Particularly since the brutal murder of cineaste Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic, on the one hand some people started questioning artists’ freedom of expression while, on the other, excessive suspicion of the immigrant arose.
When watching Achmed attend sa tante (Achmed goes to pick his aunt up), we see clearly how quickly that sort of suspicion is aroused. We see Achmed in the Arrivals Hall at Schiphol Airport. He wanders to and from between the exit from which his aunt is to emerge and a waiting area. The French word for aunt, ‘tante’, can be abbreviated to ‘Tatie’ or ‘Tata”. Which means that the title can then be Achmed attend Tatie or Achmed attend Tata, in which short phrase we can hear the word ‘attentat’ (French for ‘[terrorist] attack’). This reference is all the more loaded during a remarkable moment in the film: in the waiting area Achmed crosses the path of a figure dressed in a jacket bearing a military motif and with a hood. This – helped by the music – creates a brief but unmistakable feeling of a threat. And although, in fact, nothing exceptional occurs, those happening to pass by become possible accomplices in or victims of a dramatic incident. While Achmed, in his innocence, is doing nothing more than waiting to greet his aunt. Or perhaps not?
*) A shopping bag supplied by the Dutch supermarket chain Dirk van den Broek. In one of these supermarkets, a German woman was bitten to death by employees on the suspicion she stole a can of beer, which was not true.
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