Khtobtogone is an animated video that tells the emotional developments of Zine, a young boy from Marseille belonging to the working class of the Maghrebi diaspora, who falls in love with a girl, Bulma, and decides to change his life for her. With a post-internet aesthetic, the video redesigns the settings of the well-known GTA video game in a new context where the protagonist is a muscular young man who wears designer clothes and drives a powerful motorcycle with which he works as a rider. His daily life is accompanied by a flow of consciousness that keeps him in the balance between following his friends or taking a different path with an honest job and a family, to become “the best version of himself”. The soundtrack, specially composed by DJ 13NRV, is inspired by the contemporary rap typical of the Marseille area. With Khtobtogone the young French artist of Moroccan and Algerian origins Sara Sadik continues the exploration of the urban youth culture that she herself defines with the term of her invention “Beurcore” (Beur are Maghrebi born in France to immigrant parents, core is a suffix often used to define musical genres). The opera is a tribute to young people, their music, their fashion. Thanks to the use of digital technology, they find a space of representation in which drawn bodies become bearers of real stories.

Sara Sadik