LATIFA ECHAKHCH
Il m’a fallu tant de chemins pour parvenir jusqu’à toi
3 June - 2 September 2007
from Tuesday to Sunday, 2 -7 pm

Latifa Echakhch, (born 1974 at El Khnansa, Morocco. Lives and works in Paris and Zurich). Recent years have seen her become one of the more prominent artists on the new French scene.

- “I need so many paths to find my way to you”: how did you choose this title?

It’s a phrase that was reworked by my memory: it came originally from Pickpocket by Bresson. They are the final words spoken by the main character: “Oh, Jeanne, to reach you, what a strange path I have had to take.” In the film it has an existential, romantic significance.
The phrase, comes into my mind whenever I finish a piece, because I work to a certain kind of economy: reducing and radicalising each project as much as I can. Sometimes I have to take a very long path in order to come to a simple, necessary form. It can also be read in a more personal light.


- How do you go about making your works? Do you make them yourself? What kinds of material do you choose?

The objects and material that I use are chosen because they are banal and easy to recognise. They enable me to present artistic actions that are easy to grasp and thus to show the critical fault lines in what surrounds us.
An oriental carpet, doorsteps in council flats, tea glasses, lino, tar, couscous, carbon paper, sugar cubes, food colouring, microphones, TV shopping, classical ornaments, and also administrative or diplomatic turns of phrase. I exhibit them in installations or, more rarely, in videos and texts. I handle them by adding a simplified, understated aesthetic dimension.
I am particularly interested in the poetic dimension of artistic action, because the poetry that interests me is one that deconstructs the sensible. Dealing with that gives you a permanent critical interaction.
What I do is fairly easy. There are not many things that I actually make. I don’t really believe in the concept of the “artist’s creation.” I like the idea that people can say, “I could do that.” The artist is not an exceptional being.


- Have the dimensions of the “Rue” space changed your usual way of installing your shows?

Of course, it’s a long way from a classical white space. La Rue is unlike any other exhibition space in the world: 900 square metres that are completely open under a 21 metre glass ceiling, with interior architecture that is not at all right-angled. To begin with I had to find a way a grasping its dimensions.
Drawing on the floor gave me a way of diving up the space without erecting partitions. So, there are two scales, that of the landscape surrounding the whole horizontal space, and that of the works on a human scale.
This drawing has a very simple shape, a star, the classic decoration on doors and the walls of mosques and palaces in Morocco.
These ornaments developed when the representation of human figures was prohibited. Their symmetry and geometry mean that they can be reproduced ad infinitum, making it possible to approach the absolute, and therefore the divine.
The title of this series is dérives [drifts]. It was inspired by the psycho-geographical drifts of the Situationists. By a process of wandering, I thus revisit this drawing technique, a bit like a bad student: the geometry becomes chaotic, the symmetry is undermined, and the absolute is therefore impossible.
For the space of La Rue, these lines are marked out on the floor strips of fine tar. They mark out a path which de-structures the space, and that visitors are free to follow or not.


- In this exhibition you combine objects and concepts from Oriental and Western culture. Is this something you always do?

I am interested in objects that are identifiable. It doesn’t take long to understand where they come from and who they’re for, or where they can be found. They enable me to situate myself in the world politically. And of course, being of Moroccan origin, and still a Moroccan, Arab popular culture is what constitutes me, in the same way as French, European and international culture and traditions. When I’m looking for simple or banal materials, that is the culture where I inevitably find them.
However, my relation to these objects is not over-emotional or nostalgic in any way. They are as strange to me as to any Westerner. I just show what I do with them. I can identify them as part of my own culture and, at the same time, they are completely alien to me. There are no tea glasses in my home.