In Horse Day, captured by Mohamed Bourouissa, we witness the documentation of a symbolic and liberating parade, the result of more than eight months of work. The horse, evoked in the title of this festive day, seems to serve more as a pretext than as the true protagonist—yet without diminishing its dignity or presence. In fact, it is subtly elevated.
What is most striking and intriguing is the context: a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where a community of young African American volunteers dedicate themselves to organizing and staging an equestrian competition with a social and solidarity-driven purpose. Bourouissa lived and worked alongside them, creating a film with the riders of what becomes a true urban stable, deliberately deconstructing the conventional, classic Western settings typical of American genre cinema. This shift in setting and landscape functions as a purposeful “displacement,” central to Bourouissa’s message: to draw attention to the legacies of colonialism and the contemporary realities of racial and socioeconomic inequality.
Bourouissa develops a coherent poetic practice that examines contemporary societies by choosing to observe, engage with, and document groups and individuals living on the margins—those “left behind at the crossroads between integration and exclusion,” as the artist himself puts it—yet who find ways and strategies to confront and overcome their circumstances.
Saddles, bridles, reins, stirrups… nothing is overlooked, and at the same time, everything is reinterpreted and redesigned, both in material and aesthetic terms. Nothing appears exactly as one might expect, yet everything feels remarkably coherent. The gaze is irresistibly drawn to shifting, unusual details—everything seems perfectly right, and yet, somehow, not quite so.

Horse Day, 2014
Color photograph
Photo by Lucia Thomé
© Mohamed Bourouissa ADAGP
Courtesy of Mennour Archives, Paris

24/09/25