Les mains nues transports us to an open-air quarry south of Brazzaville. The evocative power of sound makes us hear - and imagine with fear - the long days punctuated by singing and the rock that is broken in the hope of being able to afford food, sandals, or even the materials required for this difficult work: "Look at my hands. They are bare, because I don't have the money to buy gloves. My skin is hard, it's too hard to caress my wife. I can't caress her.

 

Taking advantage of the fact that the Congo River is dry every summer, men, women and children break rocks all day long, reflecting on their sad fate as their poorly paid work echoes in our ears and punctuates their sentences. 

 

 

Then the nature of the sounds changes: a little further on, a competing Chinese company has tools that can blow up the ground.  

 

 

Finely conceived, the soundscape - where we go from French to Chinese to Lari - also lets us glimpse a nature threatened by extractivism. 

 

 

Like everywhere else. 

 

 

 

Jenny Cartwright
Documentarian and audio artist