Percée

The projection of the Percées could also be envisioned on the scale of a wall or a movable partition. The space would create a sort of large optical chamber, with the wall or partition acting as a shutter. Alternatively, the wall shutter opens and closes, sometimes letting light through and sometimes blocking it, reverting to being just a wall. On an architectural scale, a cinematographic-photographic mechanism is invoked, with its intrinsic elements: screen, shadow, appearance, and mechanical flickering.

When spectators enter the exhibition, they step into darkness to be exposed to lights (both the interstitial lights emanating from openings and the continuous light from video projectors).

The exhibition project revolves around the functioning of elementary things transformed into sensitive intermediaries. It also activates elements—primarily the wind—by invoking them as vectors of circulation and dissipation of matter. Light, emanating from tiny cracks in the walls, whether real or fictional (or illusory?), penetrates the room. These infiltrations are sometimes very minimal and reveal little. The light openings sometimes disappear. I also want to give significant importance to the site's "breath", especially in terms of its architectural boundaries.

A common denominator in my current research: palpitation, which gives rhythm to the circulation of the elements. This palpitation is found in the luminous flashing and slight trembling of surfaces and membranes. The palpitations are temporal markers. Through the intermittent rhythm of the flashing, they play on the interval that separates the apparition and disappearance of two images, two events, alternating what is revealed and what escapes from the audience’s view.

The physical limits of the exhibition site will be treated in such a way as to create diverse spaces for movements and projections. The idea of the opening, or aperture, touches on this. It carries in itself the idea of the ‘opening’ as a breach that allows an infiltration from outside. The light that filters through and the motifs that are filmed evoke the existence of the ‘hors-champ’, or ‘out-of-frame’. This ‘hors-champ’ is multiple and imagined. The landscape that can be perceived behind the paper, but it remains vague and distant. A body? Several bodies? A crowd? A city? A natural landscape? Another country? It’s possible to retain certain signs or indications of the place and its geography, but this Elsewhere should emerge as somehow troubling to the viewer. And here we come to an element that I find essential: breath. Coming and going, opening and closing, pulsations. Matter pulsates, the walls unfold and vibrate, their movement indicating a current of air.

Ismaïl Bahri
Excerpt from A space to see