MALIK NEJMI -THE MIDDLEMAN
- Fighting to exist on a foreign land aks formidable existential questions: Should we return to the country? Should we remain in the "hostile" land?
No title - 2016 In After the colonialism project 24x17 cm, Collectin of the artist, ed. of 1
TEXT BY HOU HANRU, DIRECTOR OF MAXXI MUSEUM, ROME, 2014 catalogue Immigrant Song Angelica Mesiti + Malik Nejmi panoramic vidéo installation “4160” (Collection du MAXXI)
Malik Nejmi, a French artist of Moroccan origin, in turn, brings us to an intimate, but equally open, space of cultural dialogues. This space spans across the Mediterranean from within the artist’s personal world – his family’s private negotiation with the complexity of cultural memories and postcolonial realities. Born in France, he frequently travels between the two shores of the Mediterranean. Attempting to rediscover and reconnect with his Moroccan roots, he involves his family – from his parents to his children – in an adventure aimed at investigating the tension between displacement and settling, construction and destruction, life and death. This allows themto explore and understand the meaning of living in a reality where migration becomesa destiny for everyone. His film “4160” (titled from the number of his grandmother’s tomb in a public cemetery), enforced with musical interventions of his long-term collaborator Mathieu Gaborit, is the outcome of his 1-year residency (with his family) in Villa Medici, Rome. From this semi- permanent home base, he and his family travelled back and forth to Morocco. The two sites became a mobile studio in which Nejmi, with his children, investigates the intense but intimate relationships between various generations, geopolitical locations and ethnicities via dialogues between bodies and family objects. Along with a series of photographs titled “The Moroccan Room (La Chambre Marocaine)”, the film, in attempting to “return to the root” by revisiting the tombof his grandmother, not only reveals scenes of travelling and of family reunions but also the profound productivity of trans- cultural and transgenerational conversations, emotional and vital. These conversations, rather than being unfolded in a conventional narrative – oral and textual – is instead played out through body movements – dance, performance. They are further emphasized in visual-audio forms: moving images and electronic music. Cutting between realistic landscapes, family portraits, imaginary scenes with abstract forms and body movements, the film creates a poetic space – a sentimental universe in which we are constantly experiencing the fading-away and the re-insurgent. The film becomes a trans- cultural interface between the two sides of the Mediterranean, the most intense stage of human dramas/comedies today.
actualy /
Crossed (perfomance) 50 min.
An ethno-poetic inquiry, a stroll in an Afro-futuristic Casablanca, an heroic quest for the migrant who, and its impact today on our western societies and bodies. A show that immerses us in a particular intimacy, between the cinema, the performance, and a break up installation of a work that would precede the museum.
with Mehdi Krüger (slam), Touda Bouanani (performance, voice), Laurent Durupt (piano) French Institute of Casablanca Césaré Reims, La Comédie Reims scène d’Europe 2017
Crossed (Traversés) - 2017 A CINÉ-ROMAN PERFORMANCE a creation of Malik Nejmi with Mehdi Krüger, Touda Bouanani, Laurent Durupt
Crossed (Traversés) - 2017 A CINÉ-ROMAN PERFORMANCE
a creation of Malik Nejmi with Mehdi Krüger, Touda Bouanani, Laurent Durupt
FILMS, VIDEO, INSTALLATIONS (2013-2016)
EXPERIMENTAL MOVIE INSTALLATION
HAFA (THE EDGE) – (2017)
BARBARA SARREAU (DANSE) & MAXIME BARTHELEMY ( MUSICAL COMPOSITION) production Groupe de recherche Expérimental et Cinématographique (GREC) Camargo Foundation residecy proframm Fondation Nationale d’Arts Graphiques et Plastiques (FNAGP)
On a seashore, an extended body seems to come alive again. A character whose faces are never seen, slowly descends, slips towards the sea. Through his movements, sounds reach us from his body, giving a poetic interpretation of an art in motion. At the same time, a voice reads a letter destined to an African migrant. This project, film and installation, comes from the meeting with Omar Ba in Tangier (see Corpus Monumenta), an experience of which I am haunted by the presence of "the foreigner, the migrant" Has absolutely jostled. It is complex to try to translate what I seek to film and to tell through the presence of this body, but it is necessary to define well what body is talked about in the migration? As part of the Hafa project, Barbara Sarreau appeared to me as potentially "being that body", the character of the narrative - the body resulting from this collision between Omar and me. It seems clear to me today that this body exists as a semantic and aesthetic collision. From this posture and this liminal situation that was my Tangier experience, I sought to provoke this: what can it reflect from the encounter, from the crossing between an "immigrant son" who returns to the country of his father and a " Clandestine migrant "who tries to extricate himself, to leave at any cost? What is happening in this field of investigation, what art, what narrative can emerge from these crossed migratory paths? And how can the materials resulting from this human and artistic experience make migration differently seen as an "art of displacement"? There is no scenario other than this plan of situation. A body, a space (a large flat stone in an inclined plane, the decoration of which recalls the Greek and archaic theater where the protagonist played several roles), a seaside, a descending light. A constraint: reduced working time at twilight. This is to act the time of the performance as a time of the narrative and leave it to a form of improvisation.
Hafa (The edge) - 2017 with Barbara Sarreau, 20 min. installation and projection vidéo
Hafa (The edge) Cellphone movie capture from the Hafa hill, Tangier
CORPUS MONUMENTA - (2015/2016) MIXED INSTALLATION VIDEO, DRAWINGS ,OBJECTS
production of the artist, Tangier (Morocco) Méditerranan Institute of Advanced Research program (IMeRA, Marseille) Fondation Nationale d’Arts Graphiques et Plastiques (FNAGP)
As part of a research project on Senegalese migrations carried out in 2015 for the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Research (art and science), I decided to produce a clandestine cinema at the borders. After my meeting with Omar Ba - a young Senegalese in transit in Morocco and living in Tangier for a time that he himself can not really define anymore - he tells me how these sub-Saharan clandestines organize their « self-managed crossings » Strait of Gibraltar. I decide to start a documentary production with Omar and his friends in the Boukhalef district, to film both the techniques of crossing and the links to the objects of the migration (oars, buoys, photographs ...), but also the previous rituals of the crossing as well as the everyday life and the imagination which develops itself during the production of its narrative. Little by little, Omar seems to acquire an investigative role within his group of friends and arrives, in hindsight, at the corner of a room in their apartment, to make speak these young Senegalese in distress. His films reveals a material organization that plays with the smugglers, reveals a clandestine captaincy and the organization of crossings in makeshift zodiac, just as he denounces in a word the role of the military and the drifts of an immaterial boundary, in the middle sea. Filmed with cell phones, these short films and sequences are the image of Omar's performance to unveil his migratory project. This production could be both a video series, an ethnological film, a museum installation as it moves the strategic positions of representations of immigration into the Mediterranean. It is also on the basis of the observation that migrants and illegal immigrants are never actors in the way they are represented (the clandestine serving as a political object in the artist's discourse) that I wished to leave the artistic strategies to allow a liminal and epic work to be done, where the notions of frontiers and countries are dissolved in the narrative and imagination of the migrant. Around this clandestine story, I imagined then the production of Corpus Monumenta installation that integrates all the research materials: films, found photographs, objects, drawings ... bring together an ongoing reflection on the relationship with body in contemporary migration.
videos by Omar Ba / in ‘Corpus Monumenta’ video loop on wall videos de Omar Ba / in ‘Corpus Monumenta’ video loop on screen
RESEARCH PROGRAM ARTS AND SCIENCES CAMARGO FOUNDATION -2016 With Sophie Bava, Sylvie Bredeloup (Institut of Research and Development, Dakar / Rabat)
The installation Corpus Monumenta is a set of media gathered around the collaboration between Malik Nejmi and Omar Ba in Tangier. Thus three installation areas are set up around the project: videos by Omar Ba (54 min., 12 sequences), drawings in transit (notebook and boards), and an experimental space where are presented the objects given by Omar (seven wooden oars, a buoy, a religious booklet, a can, a cloth, a child's object, a letter) as well as a set of photographs made by Spanish custom officers in Ceuta and I found on the internet.
This installation project is the subject of a wider research on "objects of mobility". How do these objects of migration come to be interpreted by artists, researchers and curators who constantly question the new spaces of the narrative between the field work and the restitution of their work?
Little pocket coranic book, Omar Ba / in ‘Corpus Monumenta’
‘Double fond’ / in ‘Corpus Monumenta’ set of photographs from spanish custom officers, Ceuta
Next page From the serie ‘Double fond’
In transit drawings : The book of crossing / in ‘Corpus Monumenta’ Book of 32 pages, drawings and letter from Omar Ba and young senegales boys in transit, Tangier, 2015
THE DEAD ARE NOT DEAD - (2015)
VIDEO PROJECTION
production of the artist, Italy, Résidence Villa Médicis Post production Imagin Film + Catalogue by Kulte Gallery (Rabat, Morocco)
This is for me to deal with the figure of the itinerant vendor as a hero of modern times. Fascinated by the courage of these young Senegalese who travel throughout Europe, my work finally led me gradually to get closer to the Senegalese community established in Italy. I followed and accompanied this diaspora at a particular moment in its history: the commemoration of the murder of two Senegalese street vendors in Florence, Mor Diop and Samb Modou, murdered by a fascist extremist affiliated to the Casapound party in December 2011.
This act highlights the racist feeling that it is also crystallized by a context of crisis in Europe - economic crisis, cultural crisis - just as it becomes the symbol and awareness of the flaws of an eroded migratory system. I first met the young Senegalese in a moment of religious expression in a small mosque where they go regularly. A sort of "living picture," a group of men gathered, tried to organize themselves for a collective prayer, a prayer for the dead, as is done in any Muslim context.
The video restitutes this time of prayer organized by the families of victims in December 2013 on a long sequence film. This moment reveals the content of the violence that has sprung up on this community and the close links between the religious and the political.
Allowing a camera to film this intimate moment (this is an integral reading of the Koran) is a way of prolonging the struggle: fighting to exist on a foreign land asks formidable existential questions: Should we return to the country? Should he remain in the "hostile" land?
Questions that also interrogate necessarily, the position of the artist in civil society, issues of commitments inherent in the fields of cinema and contemporary art. The title of the film is inspired by the book "Les Souffles" by the great Senegalese poet Birago Diop, words read on the public squares by the representative leader of the Senegalese community of Florence which then sound like an anti-fascist political slogan. Hence the necessity to better understand the foreigner in his cultural expression and capture through this video the almost carnal relations of politics and religion in the Senegalese migratory context. Hence the need for commitment to have a better reading of the adversity that is built in the contours of a clandestine immigration that just needs to be better understood. The work which claims the idea of a sequence thought as a social picture, attempts at the same time to propose a space of dialogue and culture animated by the desire to denounce the processes of exclusion of migrants in the city.
Next pages Catalgue, by Kulte Gallery & Editions, 2015 The dead not Dead, installation project, Italy, 2015 HD vidéo projection, color and black and white, 24 min., 600x335 cm
still from The Dead are not dead HD vidéo projection, color and black and white 24 min., 600x335 cm
still from Afromarket variables dimensions , wall pictures Archives from Roberto Bianchi, historian, Univeristy of Florence
AFROMARKET* - (2016) WALL PICTURES
production of the artist, Italy, Résidence Villa Médicis French Institute of Florence, Italy *
In collaboration with Roberto Bianchi’s archives (historian, University of Florence)
Since 2013, in parallel to my personal work, I continue and accompany the Senegalese migration routes between Florence, Tangier and Dakar. A sort of investigation of the tutelary figure of the modou-mouou, these young street vendors who since the 1980s travel across Europe carrying a certain "circulatory" vision of the world. One can even read, in some theses, that the most convinced young Mourides see in this traveling work a "way to take back what the whites took from Africa" ... We can even read, in some university theses, that the most convinced young Mourides see in this traveling work a "way to take back what the whites took from Africa" ... For my part, I attached myself to a part that was not very visible and unrecognized in their ideals, that of political settlement in the host country, see, in the course of transit in transit countries for illegal immigrants Senegalese in Morocco for example.. First of all, following the tragic events of December 2011 and the fascist assassination of Mor Diop and Samb Modou - I produced and produced a clear film supporting the part played by this diaspora in the face of European racism. .. Around this clandestine story, I imagined then the production of Corpus Monumenta installation that integrates all the research materials: films, found photographs, objects, drawings ... bring together an ongoing reflection on the relationship with body in contemporary migration... Then, as part of my research and encounters, I discovered the existence of the same fact, in the same city of Florence. In April 1990, following neo-fascist aggression, Senegalese street vendors became the target of primary racism (accused of being dealers, putting girls on the sidewalk...), they were mainly targeted by traders Florentines and part of the population of the city center since they occupy the public space to work. The mayor of the time then rallied to the rich Florentine traders ... the Senegalese decide to go on a public hunger strike in the forecourt of the Duomo and will set off a surprising set of events and causing the fall of the mayor of the city. These events take place in an equivocal world political period: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events in Tien an Men Square, free movements Nelson Mandela and Zulu Nation, the beginning of the Rap, and in Italy the end of communism and Berlusconi's arrival in politics and in the media.
still from Afromarket variables dimensions , wall pictures Archives from Central National Library of Florence
Afromarket is a retrofit archive, documents as precious as rare, videos vhs films and newspaper according to the municipal archives. The two parts of research and production coexist and show us a migratory narrative suspended in time, whose slogans « On est ensemble ‘We are One) » were claimed in 1990, then remixed in 2011 and 2013 in « Partigiani siempre » at the demonstrations of young Senegalese, as reminiscent of the Senegalese adage that is heard daily in the streets of Dakar ; « We are together », as a supreme formulation of an ideal of life where migration and borders would be overwhelmed by the power of a street political language and an African vision of free trade, and the advent of a fair return of things, a sort of Southern feedback on the North. This is an attempt at dialogue, a critical and political approach to migration rather than a consensual reading of diversity. A way for me, to say today after different exile routes, the artist that I am, and my way of thinking immigration in the light of multiculturalism.
still from Afromarket variables dimensions , wall pictures Archives from Central National Library of Florence
4 1 6 0 - (2014)
VIDEO INSTALLATION MUSIC BY MATHEU GABORIT Collections of MAXXI Museo del XXI production of the artist, Italy-Morocco / Villa Medicis Coproduction MAXXI Museum Today more than ever my work is finally situated in the realm of the poetic, marked by the movement between my two countries of origin, where, during each trip, I endlessly reinvent my own space of migration. The expression of the destiny of the son of an immigrant – searching for love, points of reference, particular emotions, a desire to write a chapter in history – is united with an equal number of attempts at passage, physical or unconscious that the film 4 1 6 0 translates into a sort of parabola suggesting the intimacy of migration. When I arrived in Rome as an artist in residence (Villa Medici, 2013-2014) I imagined my work in my studio as a space of transmission, a space of exile – I daresay a sort of “Roman getaway” – where I could simultaneously isolate myself, expose myself, project myself toward a new cycle of work and reconnect with my distant Mediterranean roots. The film presents these moments of work in my studio with my two children, random moments, staged scenes that gradually move toward a psychological voyage, a dialogue with what is revealed by objects possessed by Aïcha, my grandmother: a foulard, a cushion and an Arabic book thus become props for stage sets and the object of a perceptible exchange on the post-colonial representations evoked; issues of language and frontier are converted into motifs of infantile repetitions that interact with the making of the film, with its editing, even with its synopsis. In this sense, like with Pier Paolo Paosolini’s Notes towards an African Orestes (1970), 4 1 6 0 is a film “in progress”, a film that in some cases draws on mythology to offer contemporary history – and in particular the challenges of immigration – that which myths ignore about the limits of the known world : the Mediterranean.
4160 / panoramic video installation Maxxi museum, exhibition with Angelica Mesiti s16 mm fims, splitscreen 1000 x 290 cm, quadriphoniy sound projection, 35 min. edition 2/4, MAXXI Collection
Thus in the other part of the film–the return to Morocco–the myth. Of Hercules in the Garden of the Hesperides is mentioned, in a re-reading of history, as an “instrument for (re)capturing Africa”. In this case the question of cartography, of movement, of migratory flows and the separation of the continents constitutes the metaphor of an intimate battle (it is said that Hercules separated the Strait of Gibraltar with a sword stroke). Filming my movements as I searched from my grandmother’s home represented a means for evoking the relations between body and territory and the need, in my work, to produce a powerful language in the face of the environmental and migratory conflicts we are familiar with. Hercules’ passage at the southernmost tip of Europe thus acquires contiguity with a form of Arabic or Berber literature that, some time ago, already served as a source of inspiration for Moroccan cinema ...
I felt the need to offer my children this filmed map, this intimate and internal map that defines my ideas, my work ... The phrase « what is not spoken by the body is spoken by the film » could be used to reassume the scene in which, laying atop a Moroccan standard, both of my children approach me and cover me with all of the images extracted from our collection: postcards, archival images and family photographs cover the body of their father, as if to consecrate the time ofthe film, the time ofour flight toItaly ... the title ofthe film–the number ofthe tombin which Aï cha is buried in the large cemetery of Rabat – is the only point of reference in space and time.
4 1 6 0 thus becomes another film, another way of « measuring distances », of capturing the cultural codes of the transmission from north to south, and another way of intending a history of two countries once in love.
4160 / panoramic video installation still from the film
Mapping the world and reclaiming the myths of Gibraltar Strait ... Still from 4160 / panoramic video installation s16 mm films, coulor, sound, 2015 edition 2/4, MAXXI Collection
Mapping the world and reclaiming the myths of Gibraltar Strait ... Still from 4160 / panoramic video installation s16 mm films, coulor, sound, 2015 edition 2/4, MAXXI Collection
Mapping the world and reclaiming the myths of Gibraltar Strait ... Still from 4160 / panoramic video installation s16 mm films, coulor, sound, 2015 edition 2/4, MAXXI Collection
TEXT BY JEROME DIACRE Catalogue text from Groupe Laura revue for the Triennale of Contemporain Art, Vendôme, 2015
A child wrote in pencil on a white wall: "What is a border? Malik Nejmi's film works in a split screen. Two series of sequences, side by side, produce a dialogue. They have children playing, dancing, posing, hugging. She's a sister and her brother. The ocean is there as a permanent horizon. 4 1 6 0 is the title of the film; It is not a distance, though; It is the number of a tomb. On a black background, the film opens with a prayer addressed to the deceased. He filmed a woman washing the headstone and removing the weeds. We could name the pele-mele sequences of the film, they are all important, they all speak of a geographical situation and an emotion. The director's point of view, which appears in the last minutes of the film in the form of a "selfportrait at the camera", is omnipresent. Even if it divides the screen, the two lines of sequences are spoken, exchanged ... But they underline the same thing: the emotion of a return, the distance of a landscape with the memories that interpose, And the history of art that has built his gaze. The children seem to be the reflections of the director: by their bodies, their faces and their gestures, they address to the spectator an innocent presence that plays both on the aesthetic codes of orientalism, on memory and on the future of those who Will take charge, in turn, of a family history, a history of mourning. They have the benevolent gaze of those who do not understand what borders are. "What is a border? " We can guess the face of the director who holds his camera 16 mm in front of these children whose hand written on the wall of this house to clean spaces bathed in light and whiteness (looks like a film by Philippe Garrel) "What is a Border? ". The little girl plays with a light veil, almost transparent despite her colorful patterns. She holds the stuff on her hips, back, and all the women painted by orientalism from the eighteenth to Renoir and Picasso appear. A standing odalisque, which shakes the shawl and surrounds his brother. Together they play, are busy, maybe bored ... wait. What? That the gestures of dances and games speak of an intimacy of which they are depositaries. Memory is there, always present.
"The little girl plays with a light veil, almost transparent despite her colorful patterns. She holds the stuff on her hips, back, and all the women painted by orientalism from the eighteenth to Renoir and Picasso appear. »
These are the old family photographs, these are the postcards that the children lay slowly on the body of an elongated man; It is the opening of the film. "Dad, when are we going to Morocco? "It is done and the father asks his children to be there, with him, for him, for this memory that is the enigma of existence and at the same time gives him a sense, a direction ... And, with this film, a project. A frontier is when the life of a man becomes a landscape. He draws a line. The horizon discovers a space and masks a beyond. It is also the boundary between the moment, that of a light, a face, a movement of foam, and the duration of a memory that carries with it memories that are difficult to find but Which is recognized in the evidence of a form hidden beneath a veil. A sequence shows hands in white gloves wearing a precious fabric folded gently. They stop over a showcase of a museum. It is the Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris. Two people rest the window delicately. At the same time, the other sequence shows a woman seeking help from a man for the grave to be well maintained. A frontier is when the edge of the frame slowly disappears to reveal what passes it: a fragmented space whose unity is made by narrative. That of the voices at the end of the film, or the one we say silently to oneself, spectator storyteller. It is the universality that is reached here ... graceful and haunting, elegiac.
4160 / studio views creation with Mathieu Gaborit at the studio in Rome Villa Médicis, mach 2014 next page 4160 / studio views Rome, Villa Médicis 2013-2014
AN ODYSSEE (2015) 3 CHANNELS VIDEO
MUSIC BY LAURENT DURUPT TEXT AND VOICE BY TOUDA BOUANANI production of the artist, Spain-Morocco Coproduction Galery agnes b. and Imagin Film
During an invitation for an artistic residence in the Mediterranean sea, Malik Nejmi shares the crossing of the Detroit of Gibraltar with a scientific team and sailors who study climate change and plastic pollution. During this journey the artist searches in the intimacy on board to be told the dreams and the wonderful aspect of the voyage at sea. This request is translated by a series of black and white video portraits where it films the balance of the each body in a simple cabin of the boat. The sea seems to have penetrated us. With their eyes shut, the faces of these men and women take on the features of an antic and buried in humanity. One thinks of Platon in the Timaeus, in the myth of The Atlantide, in this people and this buried city of which one never really found trace but which will be located geographically at the limits of this Detroit of misfortune. The triptych video installation An Odyssee works to the rhythm of the music of Laurent Durupt (piano, percussion) and the poem written and read by Touda Bouanani, invited artists to perform the piano-voice dialogue for the video. We hear the pages turning, the breath of the breathing of the voice that evokes in the text a leak forward, a migration or a perilous journey. A woman's voice seems to speak to her children "Do you hear ?" or "Do not drown yourself my daughter" come to the ears of the spectator who is taken by the proximity of the poem. The text composed and read entirely in Darija (Moroccan popular language) sometimes takes up the Berber poetry of the films of the director and poet Ahmed Bouanani, father of Touda Bouanani. There emerges a political dialogue between the text and the image which uses formulas from the past - "Only the preoccupied man comes before the sea", "Sleep on the thorns until your day comes" - to evoke, in a hypnotic poetry, the question of the exile and the clandestinity that touches us today.
An Odyssey then operates on the fictional presence of a stranger aboard the ship. The question of the Detroit, the frontier, the disappearance, the dream, the burning, the death, the memory of the native land, are the allegories of a timeless and subversive poem. An Odyssey is in this sense a real experimental space where the questions of immigration and freedom join together in a single song.
An Odysee 3 channels video installation films HD , color and black and white, sound, 2015, 16 min. edition 1/3
PHOTO GRAPHY, (2005-2014)
THE MOROCCAN ROOM (2014)
production of the artist, Italy-France / Villa Médicis Coproduction Le Bal, Institut du Monde Arabe
STUDIO WORK
This studio work was motivated by the recent difficulty for me to return to Morocco, I had to build my work elsewhere, in the form of exile, or escape. It was also essential for me not to work in the France / Maghreb axis, but to imagine another trajectory, to live an experience from the south that would allow me to reconnect with my Mediterranean roots while considering otherwise the question of return to country. I finally attempted to implement a survival strategy whereby I was to re-evaluate the distances with my father's country, to reconsider my work by constructing a new narrative that would transform the power of our family exile. The workshop has become a semi-permanent space that helps to undo all that has happened so far to shake up certainties, to claim the "fall", to lose points and to evoke the place of photography (the studio or The workshop) as a new narrative space. The fragility of these snapshots with my children does not resemble any other moment in life. To each one read in these postures, the antique statuary here, quotes to Caravaggio or the Holy Family, or a re-reading of orientalist nudes, but above all to see in the transmission and the ritual what we are to seek: The relations of the body to language, from language to the frontier ... The intimacy migratory that has been constructed in this work is as much this place of appeasement sought by « the father » as the political space searches by « the artist » It is a space of transition, of negotiation, of transnarration ... and certainly a poetic response at the end of an time stuck by multiculturalism and alterity. MN, jan. 2015
The Moroccan room / fig 17 147x185 cm, from 8x10 negative sheet film C-print canson platinium, edition of 3
The Moroccan room / fig 1 & 2 147x185 cm, from 8x10 negative sheet film C-print canson platinium, edition of 3 Kadist Collection / Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration
The Moroccan room / fig 7 & 8 147x185 cm, from 8x10 negative sheet film C-print canson platinium, edition of 3
The Moroccan room / fig 15 & 16 147x185 cm, from 8x10 negative sheet film C-print canson platinium, edition of 3
EL MAGHREB - (2001/2006)
BACK TO MY FATHER’S COUNTRY Collections National Museum of History of Immigration production of the artist, Morocco
One day, I showed my father some of my photographs. My mother's grave and a portrait of her sisters, in Rabat. He simply said: "I've understood". And I took that as a token of love. The pictures took himback home.
My work on Morocco has been done in a transitory space, stretching both ways, over three return trips: "Imagesd’unretour aupays"(2001), "Ramadans"(2004), "Baoua Salam" (2005). It is a sort of declaration of love to the country, as if it were a fraternal figure, where only the necessity of leaving to squeeze this body to my chest can still give me the desire to make pictures.
Migration made it necessary to continue social relationships with the place of origin and beyond it. My father refused to return to Morocco, but the family history was drawing his son back. So it was up to me to recreate the link. At that point I realised that my work would question memory, places, feelings, the complexity of being separated from one's country, and each person's experience of the affective link with their family. I realised I would have to go further than simply stating the "official" story of immigration and talk about the ghorba, the isolation and loneliness of a country that has split from its social imaginative realm, and recontextualise the unchanging image of "the Arab" who dreams of going away.
el Maghreb My father, Ba oua Salam serie , 2005 Lambda print, 100x100 cm , edition 2/5 Collection Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration
el Maghreb The crossing, Ba oua Salam serie, 2005 Lambda print, 100x100 cm, edition 5/5
el Maghreb Soumia, Ramadans serie , 2004 Lambda print, 100x100 cm, edition 3/5
My pictures are not part of a terrible human drama "shot on the hoof". They bespeak the depression which is clouding Moroccan youth and also impacting on contemporary migration issues – and they even emphasise the tension of action, the moment where spaces cross over, lay over one another and react. The tragedy is elsewhere: it is the "white" Africa, wounded by the fiction of the Protectorate. My purpose, in essence, was to photograph Morocco in order to unframe France. Because neither my identity nor my story gives me any choice: I am at once stateless and nostalgic. Rereading my family album, then experiencing documents, the notes stuck on the back of pictures, and discovering my father's first passport, enabled me to collate the time- character of different events in our life. My photographs follow on from representations of our life experience, they show the reforming of a spiritual story, a story whose hero reappears at the surface of the image in his duration. When my father writes el Maghreb, to him it means "back home". The term Al Maghribal-Aqsâ means "the distant West", i.e., today, the suburbs of Europe.
el Maghreb Images of a return to the country serie, 2001 Lambda print, 50x50 cm edition of 5
el Maghreb Tarek (2), Ramadans serie, 2004 Lambda print, 100x100 cm, edition 3/3
"You left like a traveler and I came back as an immigrant's son." Malik Nejmi, in El Maghreb, 2005
el Maghreb My father ans i (Studi Wassim), Ba oua Salam serie, 2005 Lambda print, 100x100 cm, edition 3/5 Collection Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration
El Maghreb Museum of Fine Arts, Orleans - 2007 WITH ABDELKADER BENCHAMMA & MATHIEU GABORIT
HOW TO PLANT A DEAD TREE AND WHERE ? Collection Museum of fine Arts, Orleans, France 2007 Malik Nejmi (photography), Abdelkader Benchamma (wall drawing), Mathieu Gaborit (sound work) in El Maghreb, 280x450 cm, édition 1/3
Three artists are working around notions of social and mental landscape, each questioning the realities as well as the fantasies of a world in progress. The work opens with a short text, an interview with the young Imade, carried out in Morocco in November 2004 during the Ramadan period. Through this meeting, the photographer seeks to question the feelings linked to the dream of the West. He said « I want to leave my body ». The title of the work is inspired by the book of Driss Chraïbi « Succession ouverte », when he said that he came to France with a Dead tree Under the armes and never found any garden to plant his dead tree.
HOW TO PLANT A DEAD TREE AND WHERE ? (détail) Collection Museum of fine Arts, Orleans, France 2007 Malik Nejmi (photography), Abdelkader Benchamma (wall drawing), Mathieu Gaborit (sound work) in El Maghreb, 280x450 cm, édition 1/3
THE ETHNOSCAPE PROJECT
PHOTOGRAPHY, SOUND, MIXED MEDIA INSTALLATION TANGIER / BARCELONE production of the artist, Morocco, Spain Funds of Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Cnap)
In this photographic journey, Malik Nejmi develops a project whose documentary aesthetics is translate as a symbolic journey of an immigrant - he chooses as his pretext the first recovered passport of his father, dated 1971) his arrival in Europe by Barcelona - A contemporary journey that he developed towards real or fictitious cities, where cities are « crossings ». One could be in Tangier, Barcelona, Marseilles, Genoa or Naples, as many cities whose presence of harbor entrances raises the architecture of "migratory cities" where an iconography of the desire is drawn up. The journey of the photographer is imagined through the eyes of a stateless man discovering cities in motion. The photographs then show these obstacles, walls, passages, or even this leak forward, these wanderings retranscribed in these neighborhoods of immigration and mixity, or else along the ports or street vendors try to escape the authorities. This new narrative attempts to observe the etnic concept of a Europe which does not really exist without its immigrations.
Malik Nejmi allows the viewer to leave in the interstices of the image, leaving to the photographs their primary function, documents of an era, from the beginning of a XXI century marked by the events of Ceuta, Melilla, by the tearing of Africa to its human condition. The artist, also in motion, seems to take up the traveling photographic experiences of Vito Acconci (Blinks, Nov. 23, 1969); It is experienced by the instability of the medium and by this mental geography which it tries to superimpose to the feelings expressed by this fluidity of bodies and spaces. This sensation of strangeness in the decors of cities and ensembles is subject to this inner journey. Malik Nejmi speaks of "a body that has passed the scanner", "of a schizophrenia of identity" which he feels is a cultural heir.
The Ethnoscape project Tangier-Barcelone 2011-2021
"By ethnoscape, I mean the landscape formed by individuals who constitute the shifting world in which we live tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, invited workers and other shifting groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world that seems to affect like never before the politics of nations (and the one they lead towards each other). The ethnoscape is the « imagined form » that houses the traveling bodies, the bodies that are in motion. Either a social space that is also a mental space. Ethnoscape provides the climate that protects them from the stress of travel, and globalization. The ethnoscape is the form of existence that these traveling bodies imagine in order to protect themselves from the inherent stress of too radical contact with other cultures, climates and other habits. Either a lifestyle. Ethnoscape allows travelers to develop the faculty of developing affective and effective relationships with people from different cultures. Either a communication tool. Ethnoscapes are shaped by media techniques that make it possible to imagine, for example, a fluid India in the city of Chicago, a liquid turkey in Brussels. The ethnoscape thus designates these forms of existence which allow the deracines to repeat, nevertheless, certain cultural habits in an « other space ». Ethnoscape, as a metanational form of existence, helps these uproote people to establish a continuum between the life of before and the life of now; The here and the below. Either all of a bridge and a wall ... Arjun Appadurai After colonialism. The cultural consequences of globalization, 1999
The Ethnoscape project Tangier-Barcelone 2011-2021
The Ethnoscape project Two women, El raval, Barcelone 2011-2021
The Ethnoscape project Tangier-Barcelone 2011-2021
The Ethnoscape project The harbor, Tangier-Barcelone 2011-2021
The Ethnoscape project Tangier-Barcelone 2011-2021
AFTER THE COLONIALISM
(research program) Starting from a simple historical object of in the daily life of the Moroccans (a plastic hairbrush), I try to weave a parallel history to the French Protectorate, leaning towards a fiction relative to the American presence and the cultural influence that it had on my father and the youth of the 1960s. The title of the work is inspired by a the famous book by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (After the colonialism, 1999) and the meta-pensée of globalization until the emergence of the Arab Spring, which found an écho in Morocco during des events of February 20, 2011 …
No title - 2016 In After the colonialism project 24x17 cm, Collectin of the artist, ed. of 1
AFTER THE COLONIALISM (in progress) © A STORY OF POLITICS IN MOROCCO Archives and objects Starting from a simple historical object of the daily life of the Moroccans, the artist tries to weave a parallel history to the French Protectorate, leaning towards a fiction relative to the American presence and the cultural influence that it had on the youth of the 1960s. The title of the work is inspired by a the famous book by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (After the colonialism, 1999) and the meta-pensée of globalization until the emergence of the Arab Spring, which found an echo in Morocco during des events of February 20, 2011 …
With and around this object, I wish to create mural landscapes and have special brushes produced for this installation (colour, twisting of wording , political slogans, and drawings on the hard base). The idea could subsequently be to redistribute these objects in short series via economic circuits such as souks and local shops.
In my efforts to collect objects produced in Morocco during the protectorate and in part under the influence of an American aesthetic, apart from the music, I have been able to uncover the history of the Tazi firm (today called Richbond in Casablanca) and the beginnings of the plastics industry. The invention of the round hairbrush, the so-called Tazi hairbrush, epitomises a completely unsuspected political field. Its inventor, Abdelaziz Tazi, a communist activist, came back from a trip to France in 1953 with the purpose of « liberating his people from the colonial yoke » through hairstyles. He invented a brush for curly hair for people whom the colonists called the « Khlass » (the uncivilised, unkempt, impossible to smarten up). One needs to imagine all the young people at last able to enjoy their bodies, to move freely and to join a revolutionary pro-American aesthetic movement. It is also interesting to follow the various episodes of the Arab revolutions in Morocco, for the same firm Tazi supported the movement of 20 February 2011 by distributing plastic cellphones that enabled young people to organize themselves by sending messages.
a political history of an hairbrush Plastic objects produce at Tazi-Richbond corporation the famous plastic hairbrus and the cat « le charoulette » Next page simulation of a wall project work with hairbrushes (700x600 cm)
This vision of an emotional political geography of my father's country enables me to take an American angle concerning the future of those who, like my father, would have migrated to the United States rather than France. For if these young Moroccans of the 1960s had migrated to the United States, what impact would this have had on post-colonial relations ? I thus draw upon the testimony of contemporaries and on American archives which I am collecting for the purpose of revealing another Morocco, one that is much more influenced by the United States than by France, a country trying to get rid of the French occupant while at the same time accepting American customs – hairstyles, chaabi-crooner music, fashion, cinema... This problem of the influence of foreign presences in Morocco leads me once again to upset that image of the Arab, by showing and producing items and objects that link up through acts and gestures (non-submission, revolt) with the demands of the movements of 20 February 2011 ( ﺡحﺭرﻙكﺓة20 .in Morocco, at the time of the Arab Spring). Linked to my father’history, I will be able to collect few images, archives, obects, films and trying to propose a clear installation revisiting th epolitical and cultural period the sixties and seventies in Morocco.
668886 ………. NEW YORK BUREAU SAFI – An American cigarette, offered by an American doughboy, who is in a french tank is a novel sight to this native of Safi. But he keeps a tight grip on the basket of eggs and grins his thanks, while other Yanks inspect the dammage done to the French war machine. Credit Line (ACME) 11/26/42 (JR) - archive, collection of the artist
PAR 1035204 ……… NEW YORK BUREAU SHARP PICTURE This collection of assorted knives was among the weapons found in the Sidi Mohamed Mosque in Casablanca. They had been hidden there by rioters during the récent anti-french disturbances in Morocco. crédit United Press Photo 8-20-53 – archive, collection of the artist
NY14 II.I.55 ….. INP SOUNDPHOTO .. Casablanca, Frecnh Morocco. Here is a part of the arab crowd that demonstarted in Casablanca to hail the news that former Sultan Sidi Mohamed ben Youssef Had arrived in France from exile in Madagascar and that i twill likely that he would soon be restored to the throne curently celebrating « the feast of the Prophet » and this year is dedicated to « the glory of Ben Youssef ». Central press Association, Niov 2 1955 – archive, collection of the artist
Harlem Shuffle (serie) – 12 portraits of my father (1973, Rabat) papier marouflé on aluminium, 149x95 cm each
MALIK NEJMI BIOGRAPHY
born in 1973, at Orleans (France) french moroccan artist, live between Orleans, Rabat and Marseille Collaboration with Agence VU (Paris), Gallery agnes. B (Paris), Kulte gallery (Rabat, Morocco) « The song of immigration is a perpetual poem, a cycle of life and death, in which those who try to cross the Mediterranean as well as those who return to the nurturing country meet. We are all guided by the voices of a permanent exile. » Malik Nejmi, of Franco-Moroccan origin (born in France in 1973), examines family history with the background of collective history. After a long trip to Benin in 1999 in the footsteps of Pierre Verger, Malik Nejmi discovers and forges what will become, in an extreme variety of forms and techniques, the axis of his work: a documentary and ethnological inspiration that search the differences, the diversities, as much as those revealed within the same culture, in the same country, as those experienced by the vast people of migrations, stories lived with changing fortunes, sorrows, joys, rejects ... The whole of his work is composed in two parts: one engaged, often taking the form of small photographic narratives or documentary investigation and anthropological questions (in Africa mainly) allow him to broaden his purpose and reconquer of a territory linked to the ritual. He often accompanies communities, families, his work being attached to this notion of belonging to the group. The other, larger and omnipresent but nevertheless complex, tries to reconnect with Morocco, country that his father left to join France. In his images, Malik Nejmi uses familiar codes of transmission to compose a narrative ensemble that goes beyond the simple frame of his childhood memories, and alters the nostalgic perception of a look at the history of immigration. From his work arises an in-between territories that does not give his name, ghostly, in suspense, a "territory of the soul", where it is a question of stretching a thread between two countries, between two generations. The imaginary that was built between France of the years 70-80 and postcolonial Morocco, offers him a reason for work that he never ceases to explore: the renunciation of the father to return to Morocco becomes the source of his questioning .
He likes to cross the polymorphic destinies of those who, in search of hope, migrate to Europe, like those of immigrant children who, in search of love, try to return to Africa and the country of their parents. In this respect, it is in the vein of the artists who interact with the Mediterranean, who listen and try to translate the echoes of a world in motion, in perpetual migration. In 2005, he received the Kodak Award for Critacal Photography, a special mention of the Nadar Prize Jury for the book el Maghreb 2006, and the 2007 Photography Prize of the Académie of Fine Arts, Institut de France. In 2009, he obtained a major research grant for his work on the Laotian community in France; He was invited to the Paris Photo 2009 Statement "Arab countries invited", curating by Catherine David. In 2011, he receives a research grants abroad from the National Center of Plastic Arts (CNAP). In 2013-2014 he is a resident of the Villa Medicis in Rome. In 2015 he is a research fellow at the Mediterranean Institute of Advanced Research (IMéRA Marseille), winner of the National Foundation for Graphic and Plastic Arts and the Institut Francais Hors les Murs 2015 grant programs. He has exhibited at the International Encounters of Photography of Arles, the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco, the CCCB in Barcelona, MACVAL, MAC Marseille, MAXXI MUSEO del XXI in Roma, the National Museum of the History of Immigration, the Museum of fine Arts of Orleans, Museum of Marrakech, the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Centro de la Imagen of Mexico, the African Encounters of Photography of Bamako ... His recent works are in the collections of the CNAP, the National Museum of the History of Immigration ... His work has been selected by Hou Hanru and Evelyne Jouanno, Isabelle Renard, Thierry Olas, Catherine David, Franck Lamy and Julie Crenn, Diane Dufour, Raymond Depardon, François Hebel, Gabriel Bauret and Geraldine Bloch, Laura Serani, Christian Caujolle and Kader Attia.
Portrait of Malik Nejmi by Arte Creative 2016 http://creative.arte.tv/fr/episode/malik_nejmi?language=fr
LINKS TO VIDEO WORKS ON VIMEO 4160 (panoramic vidéo installation) – 2014 – 35.30 min. https://vimeo.com/106663182 CORPUS MONUMENTA - 2016 Installation at Leipzig Grassi Museum https://vimeo.com/172431840 http://grassiinvites.info/dazwischeninbetween/maliknejmi/ IMERA RESEARCH IN TANGIER (2015) Video by Omar Ba https://vimeo.com/132213981 AN ODYSSEE – 2015 – 13 min. 3 channels vidéo, with Touda Bouanani https://vimeo.com/141157637 THE DEAD ARE NOT DEAD – 2014 – 17 min. https://vimeo.com/119842968
Galery agnes b., 2011 (Paris Photo) El Maghreb photographic installation Group of 45 photography , édition of 3
Personnal exhibitions 2016 el Maghreb, Museée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux, nov-dec 2015 An Odysseee, vidéo installation, Galery du jour agnes b The dead are not dead, vidéo installation , Kulte Gallery, Rabat (Maroc) (cat.) 2014 The immigrant song, vidéo installation, MAXXI, Rome [curators : Hou Hanru ; Monia Trombetta] 2013 Malik Nejmi - monographic exhibition, L’Atelier ; Galery Confluences, Nantes 2012 El Maghreb, Scene Nationale Liberte, Toulon 2011 Phnom Penh Photo Festival, French Cultural Center, Phnom Penh [curator : Christian Caujolle] A bird in the hand worth two in the bush, Norway Trondheim Photo Festival 2010 A bird in the hand worth two in the bush, Galery l’Atelier du Midi, Arles Laos Diaspora Tour, Collegiale Saint-Pierre-le-Puellier, Orléans 2009 El Maghreb, French Institute, Meknes ; Galery 127, Marrakech 2008 Institut de France, Paris El Maghreb, Mois de la photo, National Museum of Histoiry of Immigration, Paris 2007 El Maghreb, gallery Stimultania, Strasbourg 2006 El Maghreb, Museum of Fine Arts, Orleans [with : Abdelkader Benchamma] Photographs of du politic and society, monographic exhibition, International Encounters of Photography of Arles [curator : Raymond Depardon] 2004 Images d’un retour au pays. El Maghreb, Fotoseptiembre, Centro de la Image Mexico DF
Collectiv exhibitions / group shows (sélection) 2017 All, mixed blood ! MACVAL, avril-sept. [curators : Franck lamy, Julie Crenn] (cat.) 2016 An Odyssee, Collections of Frac Paca et de l’Hotel des Arts of Toulon (nov.) (cat.) In Between, Corpus Monumenta, Grassi Staaliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen, Museeun Leipzig 2015 Biennale des Photographes du Monde Arabe Contemporain, IMA, [curator : Gabriel Bauret] (cat.) Triennale d’art contemporain, Emmetrop ; Drac Centre, Vendome [curator : Damien Sausset] 2014 Galery Agnes b., Mois de la Photo, Paris El Maghreb, Musee d’art contemporain MMVI, Rabat, Morocco New Afrika, La Villa, Kulte Gallery, Casablanca [curator : Yasmina Naji] Nass Belgica. Moroccan immigration in Belgium The Moroccan room, New gallery of National Museum of Histoiry of Immigration, Paris
2013 Teatro delle Esposizioni, Villa Medicis, Rome Acqua Vitalis, Artotheque of Caen, Palais Ducan, Caen Le Pont, Musee d’art contemporain, MAC Marseille Galery Agnè s b., Mois de la Photo, Paris 2012 J’ai deux amours. National Museum of Histoiry of Immigration, Paris [curators : Hou Hanru, Evelyne Jouanno] 2011 We love photography !, Galery agnes b., Paris Paris Photo, Galery agnes b., Grand Palais, Paris Africa: see you, see me, Africa.cont, New York ; Florence ; Accra ; Lagos [curator : Awam Ankpa et Okwui Enwezor] El Maghreb, Bibliotheque departementale Gaston-Deferre, Marseille 2010 Resonnances, Musee de Marrakech [curator : Brahim Alaoui] Africa: see you, see me, Museo da Ciudade, Lisbonne [curator : Awam Amkpa] France 14, International Encounters of Photography of Arles (cat.) Bibliotheque Nationale de France BnF, Paris 2009 African Biennale of Photography of Bamako [curators : Laura Serani et Michket Khrifa] Paris Photo Statement. The Arab countries invited, [curator : Catherine David] 2008 El Maghreb, Collections of National Museum of Histoiry of Immigration Iconoclastes. Territoires de l’esprit, Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris [curator : Kader Attia]
Grants & fellow research program 2017 Research program IRD Rabat, Morocco 2016 Residency Fondation Camargo 2016 Residency French Institute of Casablanca 2015 IMeRA fellow research, University of Aix-Marseille, Marseille 2015 Fondation National d’Arts Graphiques et Plastiques 2015 French Institute, Programme Hors les Murs 2013-2014, Villa Medicis, French Academy in Rome 2011 Research fellow, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, CNAP 2009 Drac Centre 2009 Commande publique CNAP 2009 Residency Cultures France (Mali, Kenya, Madagascar) 2005 Drac Centre Awards Award of Photography of the Academy of Fine Arts 2007 / Institut de France (Academie Francaise) Special mention of the jury of Prix Nadar du livre – award given to H.C. Bresson, 2006 Kodak Award for critcal Photography 2005
Institut du Monde Arabe of Paris, 2015 The Moroccan room, photographic installation
Catalogues - Books Tous des Sangs-mêlés, MACVAL, 2017 D’une Méditerranée, l’autre - Hôtel des Arts de Toulon, FRAC-PACA, 2017 La triennale d’art contemporain de Vendome, Editions HYX, 2015 Les morts ne sont pas morts, Kulte Gallery Edition, 2015 Teatro delle Esposizioni. French Academy in Rome, 2013-2014 Mois de la Photographie, Editions Actes Sud, Arles, 2014 New Afrika, Kulte Gallery Edition, 2014 Acqua Vitalis, Artotheque of Caen, 2013 Que reste t’il du present ? Collecter le contemporain dans les musées de société , Musee Basque 2013 African Influences on Contemporary African Photography, Africa.cont, 2012 Arab Photography now, Edition Kehrer Verlag, 2012 La Collection d’art contemporain National Museum of Histoiry of Immigration, Montag Editions, 2011 Photographies Africaines, Editions Pierre Bergé & Associes, 2010 Africa Scenes I, Artcurial, 2010 Mois de la Photographie, Editions Actes Sud, Arles, 2010 France 14, Edition Trans Photographic Press, 2010 International Encounters of Photography of Arles, Editions Actes Sud, Arles, 2010 VIIe African Biennale of Photography of Bamako, 2009 Guide of the collections, Museum of fine Arts, Orleans, 2009 Les aventuriers de la culture, Naive / Cultures France 2008 Mois de la Photographie, Editions Actes Sud, Paris, 2008 Livraison, Mars 2007 International Encounters of Photography of Arles, Editions Actes Sud, Arles, 2006 El Maghreb. Malik NEJMI, Editions L’Œil electrique, Rennes, 2006 Bamako. Un altre mondo, Editions CCCB, Barcelone, 2005 Fotoseptiembre, Mexico DF, Centro de la Imagen, Conaculta, 2003 Morocco, La Revue noire, 1999
Collections MAXXI, Rome The Kadist Collection Artotheque of Caen Fondation HSBC for the Photography Centre National des Arts plastiques (Cnap) National Museum of Histoiry of Immigration (group of 96 photography) Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD) Collection Art Contemporain, Museum of Fine Arts, Orleans (France)
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