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De quoi rêvent les martyrs? 2012>2013
A series of twelve drawings
Graphite and ink on paper
42h x 60w cm
A series of twelve drawings
Graphite and ink on paper
42h x 60w cm
Tunisia, December 2010. Mohamed Bouazizi, an itinerant produce seller, is publicly humiliated, deprived of his merchandise for the umpteenth time, and treated with contempt by the authorities from whom he has come to claim his rights. He sets himself on fire in front of the governorate of Sidi Bouzid. In doing so, he forms an aura around his body that dramatizes his radical loneliness. He makes his exclusion visible. He shines a light on a deep social rift, that of injustice and the denial of citizenship. But “a man who cries out is not a dancing bear”[1]. Martyrdom is not a spectacle; it is a call. As we know, the call was heard. A life died out in order to light up others. What Bouazizi ignited was a revolution.
At the time of the events, Nidhal Chamekh is in Paris. He is 25 years old, about the same age as Bouazizi. A few weeks later - when the flights, which had been suspended, resume - he returns to Tunis. An artist and a citizen, he takes part in demonstrations with a notebook in hand. Now and then, he steps out of the scene to sketch a character, a situation, an impression. Later, he will take up these motifs, combining them with others in a series of twelve drawings entitled What Do Martyrs Dream of?[2]Both in Greek (marturos) and in Arabic (shahid), a martyr is above all a witness. The martyr saw something, which her eyes remember. Is that why several characters in the series are depicted from behind, or with their eyes closed or covered with a patch? Is the violence they have experienced pushing them to look away, to turn their gaze inwards, where dreams are born?
Always, witnesses are on their own[3]. Even in court, they are surrounded by a ceremonial aura. What they are attesting to shapes a void around them. The drawings in What do Martyrs Dream of? are discontinuous assemblages of heterogeneous elements, as if each had to be allowed space to testify. Lived memories, anatomical drawings, old engravings, poem excerpts: divorced from their respective contexts, they float on the surface of the page. The backdrop is white. The world has gone missing. What the artist seeks is the right distance between things, one that allows them to become visible to each other, to illuminate each other, under our gaze. Before us is a catalogue of traces, a palimpsest of visions beyond all hierarchy: the surface is a democratic space of apparitions. One is tempted to speak of an insurrectionary aesthetic, where power is devolved to fragments, to details, to the margins of representation. An anarchist aesthetic where a defocused visual field follows a dream logic.
Omar Berrada. From the text The apparent disorder of dreams.
Mnēmē. Artist book. zaman books and curating
[1] Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land, trans. John Berger and Anna Bostock. Archipelago Books, 2013 [1939].
[2] This title is borrowed from a poem by Slah Daoudi, written in February 2011. See: http://nidhal-chamekh.com/de-quoi-revent-les-martyrs-1/.
[3] Jean Genet, Un captif amoureux. Paris, Gallimard, 1986.