Battle Piece II : Nouvelle Pangée
Battle Piece II: Nouvelle Pangée (english : New Pangaea) unfolds as a powerful exploration of movement, identity, and transcendence. The film emerges from a unique journey — one that began in the underground dance scene of Paris, where an All-Styles battle took place in a former garage in La Goutte d'Or. This raw, urban setting became the birthplace of an arena that would later be transported and reimagined within the sacred walls of the Chapel du Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Paul Eluard in Saint-Denis. This shift — from underground resilience to institutional recognition — embodies the film’s central narrative: the unification of cultural roots and artistic transcendence.
In New Pangaea, this circular arena becomes a dimensional space — a symbolic meeting ground where territories merge. Within this circle, dancers from diverse backgrounds and styles speak a common language: movement. The battle itself transcends mere competition, unfolding instead as a ritual of exchange, where bodies, rhythms, and energies collide and connect.
Yet New Pangaea offers more than an immersive visual and kinetic experience. The film places equal focus on the dancers' voices — their stories, struggles, and dreams. Beyond the language of the body, the movement of lips emerges as a catalyst for narrative, weaving together intimate reflections with the powerful flow of physical expression. This interplay between spoken word and movement reveals a deeper layer — one where these kinetic creators share not only their craft but also their humanity.
Through this fusion of dance, dialogue, and symbolism, New Pangaea proposes a new kind of civilization — one where cultural boundaries dissolve, and resilience, identity, and artistic valorization coexist within the unifying force of the dance circle.
Battle Piece : Part I
After the first dance battle intervention, presented at the Fiminco Foundation in April/2022, a film was made and presented in a dark room on a large curved screen of 236 inches.
Just in front of the screen there was a circle made of linoleum, 3.5 m in diameter, lit in its center by a warm and soft light.
This device is a delimitation in space that reinforces immersion in the environment. Whoever is in the middle of the circle feels the environment at 360º, both of what is projected and of what comes from the other sides, the sounds, the people, the ground, the walls.
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“No need to wait: the film you are watching is not subtitled. Gabriel Moraes Aquino and Nicolas Faubert have chosen to leave the words they have collected free and not to submit them to a stabilizing translation. Because here, we speak a common language, that of the calves which contract, of the chests which swell, of the whole body which unfolds. For “Battle Piece: Part I” the two artists decided to film personalities from the young French hip-hop scene and ask them what place this culture had in their lives. All of them describe dance as a modality of resistance, as a fulfilling and saving space. Gabriel Moraes Aquino's camera then acts as a kaleidoscope multiplying points of view. There are these bodies, these stories of displacement and occupation, the movements of the dancers that become rituals of deconstruction and decolonization and a final character that always remains in the background: the city of Romainville and its spaces in transition. What Gabriel Moraes Aquino and Nicolas Faubert film are the flowers that grow through the layers of concrete. The circle of hip-hop battles that appears here and there in the video becomes a space for meetings and exchanges where each body testifies to its own reality. Thus, the artists fuel a perpetual fire that reveals the vitality of a movement whose primary strength is the ability of its members to act collectively."

—  Camille Bardin (original text in french)