Performing Identity

2026
CATALOGUE, ONGOING RESEARCH FOR MY CURATORIAL RESIDENCY AT LE 18, MARRAKECH, MOROCCO

At the curatorial residency at Le 18, in Marrakech, I worked on the appetite that contemporary art institutions manufacture and sustain for otherness. An appetite, not a curiosity. Difference becomes cultural merchandise there under the vocabulary of visibility and inclusion, and it is that path I followed, from the moment a work still carries a share of opacity to the moment it circulates as a recognisable sign.

Institutional cannibalism names this mechanism. What the institution desires has nothing to do with complexity or with opacity. It wants a consumable difference, an otherness that lets itself be encountered with pleasure and possessed without remainder. Recognition operates as an extraction.

This ongoing work is a catalogue that lists the identitarian symbols that saturate the works sold or acquired during the fair. Set side by side, they trace a grammar of the sellable, a narrow repertoire of signs the market rewards because they can be read at first glance.

One question remains that the catalogue does not settle and carries within it. To document the teeth is still to produce a consumable image of the bite. The apparatus that names extraction can in turn be extracted.