Lotus-eaters (working title)

With Lotus-eaters (working title), Mehdi continues his exploration by questioning the construction of masculinities through heroic narratives of Western tradition. The starting point is an episode from Homer’s Odyssey: the people of the Lotus-eaters, whose intoxicating fruit plunges warriors into the oblivion of their identity and the desire to return. This myth – a foundation of the Western imagination – acts as a projection surface. As Joseph Campbell1 showed, myths have a metaphysical, cosmic, sociological, and psychological function. They transmit values, naturalize representations, and shape collective imaginations. In the Odyssey, they shaped the virile figure of the warrior hero: conquering, cunning, dominating.

Lotus-eaters takes this matrix to twist it, put it into crisis, and expose its cracks. It aims to shift the codes attached to heroic masculine identities: warrior violence as a sign of power, virile camaraderie as an exclusive lexicon of friendship, but also modes of complicity between men, whether heteronormative (hooliganism, bromance) or homonormative (cruising spaces, pickup codes). The project does not aim to re-enact Homer, but to question the persistence of these narratives in our contemporary representations, and to propose other futures for masculine bodies.