Fenenin El-Rahhal
Nomadic Artists
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Fenenin El-Rahhal |
Eric van Hove |
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Mission Statement |
Curriculum Vitae Artist Statement Since early 2000 I have been creating socio-anthropological and poetical objects, installations and performances with a focus on the manipulation, exploitation and transformation of written language and other forms of nonverbal communication. My work is interdisciplinary, with particular attention paid to architecture and literature, and inspired by a deep sense of wanderlust. Born in Algeria to Belgian parents and raised in Cameroon in a family of architects, the experience of foreignness has always been my middlemost watchtower (a place of equidistance). I strive to recreate foreignness and its resonances by constantly looking for improbable places in which to make my works: swimming pools, seashores, Shinto temples, nightclubs, blossoming cherry trees, funeral chapels, an arctic biological station etc.. I strive to write, transcribe, the face of things, by any means. Searching for new means, in 2003 I began an intensive study of calligraphy with Japanese master Hideaki Nagano, and I am now a Ph.D. candidate at Tokyo National University of Fine arts and Music (Geidai) in Tokyo. The founding myth of painting is said to be a young woman who traced on a wall the outline of the man she loved before he departed, never to return.* For me, the founding myth of writing is that selfsame trace. If I appreciate the verses of Alberto Caeiro for their discretion, the “slow instantaneous” of Bustamante or Gregory Crewdson for their insinuation, the walks of Robert Walser for their beauty and the music of Simon Laks for it's question, I appreciate words for their silence. It is perhaps within the artwork of Pascal Convert and the poetry of Christian Dotremont, Alejandra Pizarnik, Nicolas Bouvier, Malcolm Lowry, Marcel Broodthaers or Henri Michaux that my sensibilities have aligned themselves—hyphenated lines of changing altitude, fictive symbols inscribed on a map seen from above. I have been lead to ask, after the poetry of surrealism, of dadaism, of lettrism, of Italian and Russian futurism, and the enflamed prose of Isidore Isou, might it not be time to allow the field of language to lie fallow for some seasons? In answer, I'm tempted to transcribe the real, to write about the living without reiterating it. I usually work on several bodies of work concurrently. I develop site specific indoor or outdoor temporary installations within a wide variety of contexts, including numerous biennales or workshops (most recently in Yunnan, Dakar, Okinawa, and Alexandria). I often rework a site-specific installation into a self-contained form that enables the piece to be shown in any environment (like video for example), and often elements from my sculptures, installations, and non site-specific work are utilized in my site-specific installations. Thus, all the bodies of work to which I devote myself inform, inspire, and develop each other. Often, I use the creative process as a catalyst for social change. Example of two recent specific bodies of work that I have been working on concurrently: Abreaction: succinct graffiti—an installation that is a poetic and cathartic work of vulgarization made by traversing public space with a single sentence of automatic writing. This "intervention" invites an exteriorization of emotional tension, which according to Aristotle was one of the effects of tragedy on the audience.** A nos morts: a series of installations, performances and choreographies conceived of and executed in Senegal. Each piece takes its beginning from an excerpt of the first book of Martinican poet Aimé Césaire: "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" (Notebook of a Return to a Native Land). Césaire is known in the world of letters as the progenitor of Negritude (the first diasporic "black pride" movement), and "Cahier" consists of a series of reflections on the nudity of death in Africa, betrayal and the quest for nativity. The first three works of this series took place in the slaughterhouse of Tambacounda, close to the Malian border in January 2005. * Victor I. Stoichita; “Brève Histoire De L’Ombre” ** Poetics; VI and VIII Eric Van Hove Tokyo, 20th of March 2005
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