Archive de banalités tunisoises
"L'épreuve du dehors", 2008
"Archeology of the Visual 'Contemporaneity'", 2008


Installations
"under standing over views", 2009
"Two Paintings and a Book", 2008
"Give a name to your boat", 2008
—, french version


Approach, french
—, english

Studies
Skins, french, 2007
—, german, 2007

PDF

Give a name to your boat is an installation that is site specific, ephemeral ans interactive at once. The image takes form through a process of recording reality. In other words it consists of prints that are made of wax and ink on paper and that are taken from the walls of Tunis and Berlin, the two cities where I live. The collected imprints act as “samples-paintings” formed by the scratches and engravings left by pedestrians in the form of signs, writings, drawings, etc. All these forms of expression blend with the graffiti and other forms of street art present on the surface of facades. This work sets out to be historical in the sense of a contemporary archaeology. By gathering images that are stripped from the paste of the ephemeral, the protagonists of this work become as much artists as the time, the passers-by and strollers. I chose to work exclusively with paper (this light material that is easy to transport) because it stresses out the idea of traveling and the notion of displacement/emplacement on which I work. Indeed, I brought all the imprints in my suit case.
The little paper boat has become an archetype due to generations of children who have tinkered little ship forms with paper. The small paper boats, which the visitors are invited to construct and to give a name to, display images of a walls on there exteriors. While moving around the two walls (imprints from Tunis and Berlin), the viewer is asked to leave his boat (a dream, a border, a thought, etc.) and catch another one and continue his “trip”. Besides, the construction of the boat is quiet complicated. In order to succeed, the visitor must follow carefully all the steps indicated on the paper he is going to fold . It is with a playful form that this artwork evokes the complexity of bureaucratic institutions and the rigid schemata that one must undergo to get the right “papers” and the right to cross borders. However, the small paper boat, this children game, as light and fragile as it may appear, recalls, nevertheless, the sad events concerning drown emigrants from Africa willing to reach the other coast. In this installation, the notion of limit is inseparable from the ideas of opening, passage, displacement and free circulation . It reminds discretely and subtly two different versions of the idea of crossing over, this very old tradition of human kind.