What the neoliberal economy of our consumer society is nowadays extensively imposing as “The virtual world” is actually the reality of a technological dependence that is based on an endlessly growing derivative of its markets. This new fractal geography is boosted by our obsession with progress. The energy consumption and raw materials extraction required to develop, construct, and sustain the function of electronic devices, without which it would be impossible to enter the digitized world, are interdependent with our consuming behavior, dogmatized as a “raison d’être” by the society we live in: “I consume, therefore I am.” From the individual…
(more...)

Our contemporary world is haunted by wounds from the past. Over centuries multiple inequalities have arisen—between rich and poor, between men and women, between races, between cultures. From the dawn of Humanity, one hundred billion humans have lived on the Earth. The trace of their existence remains in our psyche. But the traumas resulting from the worst moments in history such as wars, famines, and genocides have left lasting material and immaterial scars which, like a phantom limb of an amputated part of the body, are still there. They demand reparation. The Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama made this observation in…
(more...)

Human voice is immaterial and leaves no trace. Perceiving its origin then seems impossible. And yet the impalpable wind leaves its signature on the mountains’ side. (Jean Abitbol, «Odyssey of the Voice»)   From politics and science to myths and beliefs, the art of Kader Attia is questioning a variety of fields. While avoiding getting lost in the production of blind certainties, Attia's ongoing research of „Repair“ causes to conclude, that determinism, even in the appearance of the most unpredictable automatism, has always been the secret of existence. While humans believe they invent, they are endlessly discovering what has existed…
(more...)

In 1996, I was living in the Congo Brazzaville during almost 4 years. I was working with an NGO on cultural heritage. One afternoon, while killing time with my friend Armand, he showed me a dead tree lying on the street, and started to explain that, during the night, this tree would turn into a large 747 Boeing plane … then taking off from this street of a poor suburb of Brazzaville, it would fly into the sky toward Paris, to lend there on the Champs Elysée avenue. All this during the night. There, the witch and his colleagues would…
(more...)

e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale This special issue of e-flux journal is published in cooperation with Wuhan Art Terminus (WH.A.T.)   The Loop ...   Peoples from ancient times have left traces of astronomic observations, the origins of which are still mysterious. Indeed, it seems impossible to have seen or understood certain cosmic phenomena without the technological means that are at our disposal today. Even if Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Dogons, and Mayans may have benefited from exceptional conditions of observation (wave pollution from big cities didn’t exist at the time), many questions will remain unanswered.   Tradi - Cosmic  …
(more...)

From the policies of distance to the abolition of spaces.     Since the beginning of time, images have shaped our thoughts. Before being made of letters and signs, words were images. As Victor Hugo wrote in his travel journal ‘Alps and Pyrenees’ : « Two rivers that run down each side of a mountain and join at its foot to form a single river make the letter Y. Two synergies giving birth to a superior force, the letter Y, that could also be the silhouette of a praying man, raising his hands to the sky. » The fact that thought will always…
(more...)

"Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real."                                                                                 -Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, 1992)   The word “injury” has a different meaning from one culture to another, but it is always expressed through a semantic parabola that oscillates from the physical to the immaterial and vice versa. (más…)
(more...)

A few weeks ago, in Austria, a teenager was arrested and judged as a jihadist, and participant of the Islamic State. The Austrian Police reported that they discovered he was planning a bombing in Vienna’s Central Train Station. They found evidence of this plan, as well as visual documentation on the massacres perpetrated by ISIS not in his pockets, nor on his computer, but in his Playstation. (más…)
(more...)

Writing published in the catalog of the exhibition "Hlysnan The Notion and Politics of Listening" Order If I am interested in “natural order of things”, it is because it binds us to our hidden human genealogy. In the spectrum between nature and culture, behaviors such as mimesis, raise a lot of questions. Through the ideas of Renée Descartes – that the past should be removed in order to build a new world, to follow reason and the logic of categories and measurements – modernity and rationalism have cut us apart from nature. One of the main aspects of modernity makes…
(more...)

There is no hierarchy in Art (André Malraux)   Considered at the time to be the capital of Negro Art, Paris was soon to meet its rival. In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art organized an important exhibition on African Art. Greatly influenced by the European avant-garde scene, this young institution was driven to become a major player on the modern art scene. However, in the early 20th century long before this occurred, private art galleries in Paris were already displaying Western modern art beside African art. In 2009, the Grand Palais held, what was to be considered, one of…
(more...)

Kader Attia   If I am interested in “natural order of things”, it is because it binds us to our hidden human genealogy. In the spectrum between nature and culture, behaviors such as mimesis, raise a lot of questions. Through the ideas of Renée Descartes – that the past should be removed in order to build a new world, to follow reason and the logic of categories and measurements – modernity and rationalism have cut us apart from nature. One of the main aspects of modernity makes us believe that humans invent to evolve, when in fact they only repair.…
(more...)

According to several postmodern philosophers and other theoreticians of Architecture, from Foucault to Lyotard and Charles Jencks, modernity is said to have started with the Renaissance.If I reach into my cinematographic memory and remember the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), I tend to believe otherwise. (más…)
(more...)

Our economy is a system in which amnesia and sophism fuel short-term vision and thought. People do not invest in a real thing anymore. Today, it is always about “the option to buy” any and every commodity. (más…)
(more...)

My researches have led me to be more and more interested in the notion of "signs of reappropriation". It is important for me, especially when talking about some "post-modernist" architectural theories that were experimented early 50's, in Algeria, by Fernand Pouillon, and then implemented in the French banlieues, before being spread all around the world. (más…)
(more...)

My researches have led me to be more and more interested in the notion of "signs of re-appropriation". (más…)
(more...)

I have been thinking about the notion of boundary — geographical, cultural, sexual, religious, philosophical — for a long time. I am interested in that issue, notably through the way architecture and urbanism have an impact on peoples’ everyday life, and particularly the way power has always used them to oppress pop- ulations. (más…)
(more...)

For several years now, I have been questioning political issues through Art, conducting my researches on these topics always in the light of psychoanalysis and philosophy. As someone born in France from Algerian parents, my childhood, spent between France and Algeria, has led me to feel close to Oriental and Arab philosophy, as well as to Occidental philosophy. (más…)
(more...)

Reason demonstrates that the order of things does not only lean on a system based on comparisons or similarities (Rene Descartes, Les Regulae).Indeed, through inference, we can also assimilate differences between things, as analogies that bind things together. (más…)
(more...)

For several years now, I am questioning fundamental issues through Art, conducting my research- es on these topics always in the light of philosophy, psychoanalysis and poetry. (más…)
(more...)