“الماء والشطابة حتى لقاع البحر Acqua e scopa fino in fondo al mare” is Soukaina Abrour’s first solo exhibition.
The title refers to a phrase used in Moroccan culture to express relief when someone or something unwanted exits our lives. It is a wish that this annoyance is swept away until it reaches the bottom of the sea.
The exhibition has an intimate and personal character: an immersive installation creates a secluded space for sharing and gathering. Images, sounds, and words from a family archive take on a speculative connotation, opening a reflection on the construction of a fragmented and diasporic identity. It is precisely these fragments, layered over time and sedimented in a spatial and emotional geography, that Soukaina confronts. The construction of the self thus transcends the personal sphere to open up to its human and non-human multitudes. This prompts a reflection on the sense of belonging and memory that we let reemerge and be contextualized, as articulated in an email written by Soukaina during the production of the project:
The installation MASHALLAH MASHALLAH MASHALLAH (which is an expression of joy and gratitude) is a work that stems from a complex and obsessive personal archive research, spanning several years. In an attempt to create an emotional and aesthetic alphabet of my relationship with a fragmented diasporic identity, I have spent hours scrolling through google photo archives. Google analyzes me, studies me, knows and catalogs the faces of all my loved ones for years and years. Alhamdulillah that Google Photo exists. Thousands and thousands of photos, most of which are to be discarded. But it is impossible for me.
Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through memories from five years ago: “journey in Morocco!”—a smiling emoji on a very low-quality selfie. Google thinks I might appreciate it. Yet, in that endless scroll, I wasn’t just seeking the comfort of a sweet memory, the joy of a shared recollection. No. I was obsessively searching for what had eluded me. The puzzle pieces of an exploded sentimental landscape. I sought those remnants of meaning that I couldn’t find in reality. Perhaps I would find them in a low-quality shot from a cheap smartphone.
To an image is given an extremely high value of testimony, documentation, reality. Yet, I believe that the image is deceptive: a frame of a moment to which layers of meaning are applied, extending beyond the image itself. It is precisely for this reason that I believe an image has the power to hold a secret, that residue of meaning that escapes in the continuous flow of existence but could find space—and time—in a shot, or its speculative significance.
Therefore, I search obsessively.
I obsessively searched through the images of my recent trips to Morocco. Family photos, photos of the women of my family. Women whom I deeply love and who have incredible strength. For years, I allowed myself to be convinced that they were women who needed some form of help to emancipate themselves: the cost of growing up within a white and Christian Italianity. A Western Italianity, that of the American dream, that with French snobbery, that with the arrogance of a glorious Roman past.
So perhaps in those photos, in those faces, in those colors, I was searching for where my betrayal lay, where I had distanced myself, but also for the residual element that could provide comfort. The residue here, then, is the element that has more or less integrally resisted alteration. A violent alteration.
What endures?
In my artistic journey—as the sixth child of seven from a very poor Moroccan Muslim immigrant family in a middle-class northern town—first in high school, then in the academy, it endured mired in pain, because everything around me made me feel inadequate and I wanted to pretend it wasn’t so. In my artistic journey—as the sixth child of seven in a very poor family of Moroccan Muslim immigrants in a middle-class town in the north—first in high school, then in the academy, it endured getting bogged down in pain because everything around me made me feel inadequate, and yet I wanted to pretend that it wasn’t so.
Art, speculation, poetry, materials, experimentation . . . had nothing to do with the economic, material, and psychological survival of everyday life to which I was—we were, are—subjected. As Saidiya Hartman writes: “Much of the work of oppression lies in controlling the imagination,” and surviving leaves little time for imagination, which is the only way to escape decay.
In my attempts to approach the work focusing only on the material, composition, the relationship between parts, the poetics of meaning, and its aesthetics—all the better if abstract, incomprehensible, inaccessible, and incommunicable—it didn’t make me feel well. But then, I would return to that archive, scrolling, searching, and searching for my diasporic Italian identity. It was like an itch, no, more like a fever, a fever of resistance from my Moroccan immune system.
Thus, hybridization came into play, the connecting element between the residue of nostalgia and the decay of loss. Hybridization here signifies emancipation from the obsession with an origin, a root towards a rhizomatic nature of creation. I began manipulating those images and using them as a playground for experimentation, activating the power of imaginative speculation, creating new narratives, never detached from their matrix but independent —> rebirth.
MASHALLAH MASHALLAH MASHALLAH starts from one of these archival photos. Four figures fill the space with a pride that fascinates me a lot, making me proud as well, without being able to grasp the reason. Faceless, illuminated, and grandiose. It’s unknown who they are, whether it’s a family, a lesbian couple with daughters, if they’re aliens, or if they want something from you. But it doesn’t matter who they are. I find this to be the right moment to bring forth this work that gives me a sense of grandiosity, pride, and rebirth in the presence of these creatures I can only say “MASHALLAH!”
at Almanac Inn, Turin
until March 24, 2024