Digital
Solo exhibition
La Boîte / Tunis
June - September 2022
Texte de l'exposition / Français
نص عن المعرض / العربية
I am writing this text 20 days before the opening of the exhibition. I am in the anti chamber, eager to see it take form. I have always loved these moments of waiting, preparing for the intense time of installation. In the meantime, I'm writing to share with you certain intuitions that built this exhibition and to evoke, a bit, the works that constitute it.
Video
This video comes from an observation made one stormy day. While watching the wind carrying sand over the ground, I got the impression of watching a film or, more precisely, a film reel running at an incredible speed, carrying seeds, dust, and other materials.
Facing this landscape, I remember thinking of the inside of an analog camera, imagining it as a box containing a storm of grains and pixels.
Filming the wind has a unique aspect: the filmmaker breathes in the wind he films. He inhales it, then exhales it, giving the wind back to the camera, and then inhales it again. This idea fascinated me, and since then, I have dreamed of a cinematic gesture that goes beyond the eye. I want to film with my entire body, ingesting and inhaling the recorded material. I know this is ambitious. I can barely achieve it.
I filmed by letting my body be affected by its surroundings. The storm filled my eyes with sand, blinding me as I filmed, and endurance was pushed to its limit. Eventually, fatigue turned the camera off.
The film is arid and abrasive. It feels like touching a rough surface that scratches the skin and stings the eyes. The wind carries anxiety, intoxicating and exhausting. The storm disorients, sweeping everything away, and I believe the camera captured the collapse of its references.
Wall
The wall built in this space has its own importance. It’s not a picture rail for exhibition, but a block, a weight, a mass. The front side is a screen where the film is projected. It gives a verticality to the piece of sand, it lifts it to face us. The back side deflects sound and, with all its mass, shelters a small sculpture.
Sculpture
This sculpture is placed in a niche. It is a rolled form made from a sample of soil from the backyard of my childhood home. A roll of adhesive tape carries the soil it came into contact with, much like a film reel captures what it is exposed to. This sculpture is a recording.
Some people told me it looks like a nest. I like this comparison. Nests are made of twigs folded around a point in the landscape, molding the body of the animal. This chosen shelter is made of the surrounding environment. From a sculptural point of view, this relationship between stretching and curling fascinates me.
Small room
In the small room, which was originally an office, I thought to reconstitute a workspace painted completely white. A table is set up in the center, displaying the remnants of a long activity.
I'm increasingly interested in the remnants produced by any kind of work. I often think of the film reels left around editors or the wood shavings left behind by a carpenter. But this can apply to any practice. For me, I've noticed that every film creates something that is immediately set aside once the shooting is finished. For some time now, I've been trying to learn how to see what the work leaves behind. Sometimes, I start from these remnants to create new things. They become useful reference points for further creations, and so on... This is somewhat what I’m trying to do here: I reactivate the remnants of a film without showing the film itself and trace the contours of an absent body — somewhat like a negative hand.
I was talking to a friend about this idea and they made a comment that I find funny but that I also take very seriously : "The dream would be for you, the artist, your gestures, and your films to disappear." That might be ideal...
Ismaïl Bahri
June 4, 2022