Abdessamad El Montassir prefers poetry to slogans
Erasing everything that would pin the Sahara to a history or an identity, the artist lets plants, stones and wind speak in his place. “Sur les ruines, les pierres fleurissent” is the most ambitious exhibition he has shown in France.
You enter the exhibition through a forest. Five screens, acacias of a raw white trembling in silence. The immersive installation Sadra Kodia rests on a Sahrawi belief: every man is bound to an acacia, and the tree engraves itself in his eye at the moment of death. The tree keeps the trace of the man. Before the first human face even appears, the visitor meets Abdessamad El Montassir’s leitmotif: the memory of a life is not held only in heads, it lodges in the living things around it. In the desert the artist comes from, many things go unsaid, out of modesty, out of pain, or because those who know claim the right to keep quiet. Rather than forcing speech, Montassir turns to what cannot lie, plants, stones, sand, wind. “Everything around us is also a witness and a transmitter,” he says. Each withdrawal has its reason: not to appropriate what belongs to others, not to fix what escapes them, to leave withheld speech its right to stay withheld. It is an ethics, and it holds up. But whatever is relieved of its landmarks also becomes, for that very reason, portable. The opacity that protects the witness and the opacity that detaches the work from its land are the same gesture, seen from both sides.
Transmitting instead of showing
The whole exhibition rests on the idea that the landscape sees in place of the men who stay silent. The wall text repeats it: go and ask the desert
Galb’Echaouf is where the work escapes this slope. It escapes by biting itself. Khadija, born a nomad and now living in town, can no longer say what she went through, so she points to the ruins and the thorny plants. Dah refuses to speak. The storyteller is a bush, the daghmous, bristling with needles. The whole exhibition rests on the idea that the landscape sees in place of the men who stay silent. The wall text repeats it: go and ask the desert. Yet the line the artist brings up on screen says the opposite: the mountains have gone blind. The thesis of the whole – the earth bears witness – is contradicted by this central sentence. The witness has lost its sight. Far from being a slip, it is the exhibition’s most honest admission, the suspicion that turning to the non-human is itself a fragile consolation and that the earth is as mute and damaged as the people. If even the earth is blind, what reaches the visitor is no longer a testimony but its atmosphere, the mood of memory without its content. And a mood travels even further than an image.
A double-edged opacity
Âabide l’kadia pushes the paradox to its end. The beads, enlarged here, served as clandestine maps for the Haratin, descendants of slaves. Markers the master was not supposed to be able to read, instruments of flight and marronage. Montassir remakes them in glass, blown at the Cirva (Centre international de recherche sur le verre et les arts plastiques) by a team of Marseille glassblowers, polished, luminous, set under gallery lighting. The object whose whole function was to stay illegible becomes a form to be looked at. The map that was meant to hide ends up displayed on a plinth. The same reversal threatens Athar Dakira, where the songs of the Haratin pass through the sounds of instruments carved from desert flora, and Asserfa, which openly shows no longer the landscape but its transmission, grey, grainy prints of places that may never have existed. The formal care is real, and it is that care that smooths the rough edges and lets these withheld stories slide towards the status of objects.
The suspicion that turning to the non-human is itself a fragile consolation and that the earth is as mute and damaged as the people is the exhibition’s most honest admission
The circuit, moreover, is already global, and the press kit says so plainly. These works about confiscated memories and the right to silence were produced by the DRAC (Direction régionale des affaires culturelles), the Villa Médicis, the Frac (Fonds régional d’art contemporain) Franche-Comté, the Institut français and, for Sadra Kodia, by Arts AlUla in Saudi Arabia. Minor histories carried by the big cultural machines are the ordinary business of contemporary art, and that is exactly what subtraction makes possible without friction. The quieter a work is about its anchoring, the better it suits every wall.
“The aim is not to make a historical exhibition,” warns the curator Gabrielle Camuset, who refuses to see this work reduced to identity positions. Montassir had already said it, more drily, in the pages of Diptyk in 2022. He works on the Sahara because he grew up there, not to claim anything. The caution is fair, the subject stiffens every discussion, and one understands why he prefers poetry to slogans. Yet by trying to remove this work from any identity reading, one takes the opposite risk. When a lived belonging turns into pure forms, into acacias of light and polished glass, it may be belonging itself that is being turned into a beautiful image. Montassir anticipated the objection: his refusal to extract and translate is meant to keep the desert from becoming a postcard to be consumed. Still, the postcard and opacity share the same reverse side; neither needs a caption. The whole stake of the exhibition lies there: whether opacity protects us from this consumption or invites us to it, and whether the hurried visitor will take away anything other than the grace of the surfaces.