“Something happens at the level of the body and its abandonment”: Barbara Pravi and the magic of her reunion on stage in Belgium

“The game allows me to have a step back, I who do not put any filter between what I am and what I give to the public. Interpret a character is to cover with a thin skin that prevents the outside from penetrating you too violently.”

Paris Match. What have changed these four years in your apprehension of the profession?

Barbara says. This album is a new adventure that teaches me even more. I am a lot on the roads, due to the enormous demand for concerts, therefore I preserve myself more. Recently, I did the Olympia and gave myself up directly after in Serbia to find my family and my friends. There, I live a total disconnection: we stay in the garden to eat what has been cultivated there, I come from a family of peasants, and I feel more today this need to return to the source. I am looking for quality time that has become essential to my balance.

You have energy to resell. Is this what makes you so popular?

I really live a moment of intense communion with the public, almost carnal and sensual, a unique vibration. Something happens at the level of the body and its abandonment, like a big party, the miracle of reunion. Besides, I quickly feel a lack during the weeks without concerts. I cross a kind of trance on stage that I do not reproduce in real life, I am not as extroverted. In concert, I am as grew up, my hands are longer, my eyes see greater, I feel inhabited by the soul of the women of my family, at least I summon it. I also receive the energy of the present people that I manage to brew and which wears me.

This connection, you have immediately established it as soon as the public has acclaimed you. Is that the reason you wanted to sing?

There is no possible communion without seeking truth. Mine went through the quest for my humanity through texts and music. Each song I write, I have the feeling of understanding myself better. Now my quest is universal, everyone has in itself a flame that unites us as humans. The scene allows me to live it in an increased way. But if it is so strong and burning, it is because I only express a feeling that inhabits us all. This burn, people can have it towards religion, family, friends, work, passions. Everything that creates the link.

A letter from your grandfather told you the story of the Pieva. Does your album represent a form of family mission?

Indeed, there is the story of my ancestor who was walking from village to village in the Serbian mountains while singing. And I who do the same job exactly 400 years later. I find this transmission super pretty. And on my mother’s side, I learned, at the end of the writing of this album, which my grandmother, whom I have never known, opened the first center for women beaten in Paris. On the one hand, you have my part of a slightly gypsy musician-singer and on the other the roots of my commitment. I find myself at the crossroads of my family’s women. Where is free will? Was I predestined? The word Serbian “Pieva” is not really translated, say that it designates the action of singing.

Can we see your songs as angry smiles?

I have a Slavic soul and therefore the energy of despair, a laughing propensity by crying and crying laughing, to situate myself between death and life. I started a psychoanalysis and the more I get older, the more I am in a perpetual state of deconstruction/reconstruction but in a positive process of continuous rebirth, between joy and sadness.

“The ruins”, “Armor”, “who I was” … so many titles carrying wrestling. What struggles?

I think I am very combative and courageous in my struggle between me and me. We are on earth to improve and it involves questioning. I never write hoping that my songs are appropriated because it would cut my creativity. On the other hand, it often happens to me in life to meet women who engage in me, even if they do not know me as an artist. I think they recognize my sincerity, I have so much empathy for them.

You say “We all come everywhere”. Isn’t it desperate to attend so much rejection and violence, precisely everywhere?

The fear of the other creates the division. Humanity has always passed through large waves of union and hatred. Unfortunately, we are at a paroxysmal moment of rejection of the other but I do not think it will last. I believe a lot in the capacities of science to demonstrate what unites us with humans, animals and plants, living. But chaos is born the resistance. Look at what’s going on in Iran. Women are imprisoned and killed in a horrible way. However, for three years, men and women have been on the street, together. We may suffer individually but together we will get there.

Eat happiness

Are you trying to understand what happiness is?

To experience it rather. To understand a state, you must have eaten it, tasted. The search for happiness involves work on oneself and our own feelings, our passions and our rejections. It is a long construction and I sincerely think that we choose to be happy.

You are most often solar. But are you able to admit moments of fragility. In the song “Maman”, you entrust your doubts and your regrets.

I am very first degree and unable to hide my moods. I show myself sincere in my joys as in anger or sadness. I gladly confide in my father, my friends. As I often doubt, I need to be reassured all the time, that I am told that I will get there, that I am beautiful, nice … My friends know it and do me every day of nice messages such as “You will spend a great day, I love you”. I find it normal that between we we get the strength and I do it just as much. I am able to kidnap a friend for two days to help him spend a difficult course. I’m lucky. Like everyone, I have holes in my experience, places that have not been filled but I have an extraordinary family overall which transmitted to me beautiful values, it remains my first base. As for friends, existence taught me that lightning blows exist and at all ages. Four pillars support my life: family, friends, work and the public. I don’t even put love. It is of course important but it goes it comes.

I seem to have found a way that succeeds, fills me, not my pockets but my mind and the heart. And if there must be, it is to fill your heart. I wish to become an old lady who has reached the best version of herself and will be able to transmit her experience.

Your very intense tour has a lot of dates in Belgium.

Ah but I have a crazy thing with the Belgian public. Coming home is party, ultimate joy. Eurovision could have been a stroke of luck. But no, there is really a real, deep link, it’s not joke.