Interview with the artist

Émilie Renard: Please can you intro­duce your­self and explain the meaning of Trab’ssahl, which gives the exhi­bi­tion its title?

Abdessamad El Montassir: Trab’ssahl means "The Land of the West" in Hassaniya Arabic. This term refers to the Sahrawi ter­ri­tory from which I come. On the one hand, it is called Western Sahara, on the other, Moroccan Sahara. But locally, it’s called Trab’ssahl. In French, I call it the Sahara south of Morocco, as a geolo­ca­tion rather than an affil­i­a­tion.

The pro­jects I’m devel­oping and pre­senting at Bétonsalon are rooted in this geo­graph­ical space. They are built on sharing with local res­i­dents and poets, around a range of polit­ical, cul­tural and social issues.

Taken as a whole, my pro­jects open a mul­ti­tude of inter­pre­ta­tions and appre­hen­sions rather than fixing a single nar­ra­tive. The poetry, oral nar­ra­tives and micro-sto­ries that run through this ter­ri­tory play a major role, both in the research and writing and in the final pro­duc­tion. These are living archives that are con­stantly evolving, that accept that some­thing is missing or for­gotten, and this open archive is an immense source of inspi­ra­tion for me. The oral tra­di­tion and its ways of telling and trans­mit­ting his­tory are cen­tral to my work.

ÉR: The dis­place­ment of nomadic pop­u­la­tions, who have set­tled in urban cen­tres, has resulted in trans­mis­sion being dis­rupted and the cre­ation of rup­tures between gen­er­a­tions. What role do you attribute to this rup­ture in your work?

AEM: There has indeed been a rup­ture between the lifestyles of our par­ents and those of our gen­er­a­tion, but some sed­i­ment remains, and it is on this sed­i­ment that I am focusing in an attempt to dig deeper into the issues and recreate bridges. As I was saying, poetry plays a cen­tral role in all this: it is a real bonding agent, a tool for trans­mis­sion and his­tori­ciza­tion. In the desert, we are driven to cross ter­ri­to­ries, and there­fore to bring with us only the lightest and most vital items. In my opinion, the most impor­tant ele­ments in this con­text are words: they are imma­te­rial, and they can travel. But while they may be light in phys­ical terms, they are not light in semantic terms. What’s more, oral knowl­edge is never fixed, either geo­graph­i­cally or in terms of con­tent. It is a con­stantly shifting mate­rial that is regen­er­ated, for­gotten and recre­ated. It accepts that it does not pos­sess every­thing, that it does not under­stand every­thing, and that it does not fix every­thing. This is part of its very essence, and this way of looking at knowl­edge and our rela­tion­ship with it is extremely pow­erful. As part of this dynamic, I am very inter­ested in the way in which Hassaniya Arabic has been able to find poetic ways of telling polit­ical or cul­tural sto­ries that are rarely if ever, told in any other way. This interest in lan­guage and the way it man­ages to create metonymies is at the root of what I’m doing now. Another impor­tant thing about the poetry of the Sahara, and a deter­mining factor in my approach to life, is the priv­i­leged place held by plants, winds, stones, sand, stars and ani­mals as iden­ti­ties. They are all seen as car­riers and trans­mit­ters of sto­ries, on the same level as humans. Each of these ele­ments has a dif­ferent tra­jec­tory, but we all live in the same ter­ri­tory, sharing the same sto­ries and traumas. We all express our­selves but in mutu­ally elu­sive tem­po­ral­i­ties. With my pro­jects, I try to include this mate­rial that slips away, this lack, like so many existing nar­ra­tives even if they are not "trans­lated."

ÉR: Do you find a method for your work in lan­guage, in its uses and changes?

AEM: In a cer­tain sense, yes. In poetry, for example, the way sto­ries are told is always very subtle: painful or dif­fi­cult things are told in such a way that they remain open, that they have sev­eral levels of meaning. This kind of flex­i­bility is pos­sible in lan­guage, and I’m also trying to apply it to images.

Mathilde Belouali-Dejean: In your films, you are often con­fronted with silence, the intri­ca­cies of speaking out or the desire to say nothing. Several of them begin with char­ac­ters who say they don’t want to talk, Galb’Echaouf (2021) and Trab’ssahal (2022-2023) in par­tic­ular. In this con­text, how do you deal with this dif­fi­culty of speaking?

AEM: I’m often faced with the need for humans to remain silent. I take this as some­thing that moti­vates my research and my work: it’s a choice and a right not to pass on one’s story. Revealing a story that may have been trau­matic also means recounting one’s own weak­ness and humil­i­a­tion. Throughout my work, I always try to bear in mind the right to oblivion demanded by our elders. But I also convey the younger gen­er­a­tion’s need to know. So, if our par­ents don’t want to tell the story, I try to find other ways of approaching the issue of pos­sible trans­mis­sion. With this in mind, I open up the sto­ries and involve other ele­ments that are capable of com­mu­ni­cating when humans remain silent.

ÉR: You refer to the "right to forget" as a reac­tion to trau­matic events that are not acknowl­edged. Is this right being asserted by the local pop­u­la­tion?

AEM: This notion of the "right to forget" needs to be set against what I call "fic­tional and vis­ceral nar­ra­tives." I think these two things are com­ple­men­tary because there are two gen­er­a­tions: a gen­er­a­tion that has seen and expe­ri­enced every­thing but doesn’t want to talk about it. I respect this right to forget, to remain opaque. And a gen­er­a­tion that wants to know what hap­pened, that wants to know its his­tory and its past. What’s impor­tant to me in this con­text of for­get­ting is to observe how these sto­ries can be passed on, despite every­thing.

MB-D: So, you’re con­trasting "vis­ceral nar­ra­tives" with some­thing that’s learned, acquired, or external?

AEM: I use the term vis­ceral in the sense of sto­ries that we feel deep inside, even if they haven’t been told to us. They are there, pre­sent in us, latent, and they have an impact on our daily lives and our expec­ta­tions. At one point, I was very inter­ested in exam­ining the influ­ence of the envi­ron­ment on an indi­vidual’s ability to express them­selves. What inter­ests me in this con­text is to see how sto­ries that are not told can nev­er­the­less be passed on from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. And con­se­quently, how, in the rela­tion­ship and emo­tional rap­port that we have with our loved ones, we manage to recon­struct and create nar­ra­tives, despite their silence and despite for­get­ting. These nar­ra­tives have some­thing imag­i­nary or fic­tional about them, they are open-ended; they are not based directly on events that have been expe­ri­enced or nar­rated, but for me, they are an impor­tant tool.

MB-D: As far as your ethics and method­ology are con­cerned, I’d like to talk about the prac­tical con­di­tions under which you make your films. What do the trips you make back and forth between your cur­rent place of res­i­dence and the Sahara involve? How do you go about it, and how long do you stay each time? Who do you know in the region? How did you meet them?

AEM: First, I think it’s impor­tant to say that I grew up in the Sahara. I never left the region until I was 18 when I left to study Fine Art in the north of Morocco. I’ve been going back there reg­u­larly ever since. My deepest roots are in the Sahara: my mother tongue is Hassaniya Arabic, and I grew up sur­rounded by its cul­ture, land­scapes and con­text. The bond has never been broken, and I’ve never been dis­con­nected from the back­ground that defines me. Since I left, I’ve been working with three child­hood friends. We’ve known each other all our lives and that makes it easier for us to get on with our work. So, most of our pro­jects involve very in-depth dis­cus­sions between us. One of them is a poet.
Each pro­ject stems from local encoun­ters. The ideas are not pre-written; they emerge from informal, everyday exchanges. The idea is always to leave the floor (and the silences) to the indi­vidual expe­ri­ences that I come across in the Sahara. Then comes the writing: a stage to get our bear­ings, to deter­mine what might emerge. I write when I’m not in the South because dis­tance enables per­spec­tives to evolve and to take a step back. Then I return to con­tinue the pro­ject, but I’m always extremely flex­ible. I never force things; I never try to cap­ture what I thought I’d find. On the con­trary, I leave plenty of room for the unex­pected, for what I couldn’t antic­i­pate: these are the very ele­ments that I sys­tem­at­i­cally keep in my pro­duc­tions. In the film Galb’Echaouf, Dah, the elderly person who we see at the start of the film, is someone I’ve known since child­hood. For over five years, I went to see him on each of my trips, and we just chatted. And life went on. Until one day he asked me if I had my camera with me. I said "Yes,” and he said, "You can film." It was impor­tant to me because it came from him, and he sensed some­thing. And the result is that he remains silent, in his way, relating his refusal. For me, this brings us back to the idea of the "right to forget," as well as to silence as a tan­gible response to trauma.

ÉR: Recently you found an impor­tant source which has proved impos­sible to use. It’s called Necessità Dei Volti, and it was com­piled in the early 2000s by a group of Italian, French and Lebanese artists and activists who col­lected 400 images from thou­sands of pho­tographs held by the Tindouf War Museum in Algeria of Moroccan sol­diers and civil­ians killed or taken pris­oner in the 1970s. You were able to look at the copy kept in the Bibliothèque Kandinsky - studying it was the starting point for your research for the ADAGP/ Bétonsalon grant - but the col­lec­tive that cre­ated the archive refused to let you use it. How do these obsta­cles to nar­ra­tive and por­trayal play out in your work?

AEM: Refusal is some­thing I often have to deal with either because people tell me sto­ries they don’t want to pass on, or because I work from archive col­lec­tions whose access and use are for­bidden or unwel­come. I have the impres­sion that these com­plex­i­ties and silences are at the heart of my work. The chal­lenge is to tell the story silently, to give form to the silence, and above all to avoid using an overly assertive voice that would set, stereo­type or sim­plify the nar­ra­tive. My pro­jects remain fluid and offer an oppor­tu­nity to explore. So, for me, the pub­li­ca­tion Necessità Dei Volti is simply a research tool that I approach very care­fully. I always try to be very thor­ough, to make sure that I know and under­stand the sto­ries, photos and images that I use. Every word has its own weight and impor­tance in this con­text. Archives are rare and those that do exist are always ele­ments of my work rather than his­tor­ical doc­u­ments. My pro­jects will give rise to nar­ra­tives made up of the sed­i­ment left by all the ele­ments I have encoun­tered throughout their cre­ation. In this pro­cess, I also try to leave room for the obsta­cles I face.

ÉR: As far as the pub­li­ca­tion Necessità Dei Volti is con­cerned, there are two dif­ferent kinds of imped­i­ments: on the one hand, a state, Morocco, has already refused the public pre­sen­ta­tion of this archive despite the Centre Pompidou showing it in 2018. On the other hand, there is the col­lec­tive’s gen­eral sus­pi­cion of art that oper­ated a form of manip­u­la­tion or dere­al­i­sa­tion of the polit­ical sit­u­a­tion rep­re­sented by the archive. In addi­tion to these rejec­tions, there are those addressed to you by the wit­nesses you have met. It is dif­fi­cult, if not often impos­sible, for you to show these sources directly in your work. What diver­sions do you take in your research in the face of these obsta­cles?

AEM: This is an impor­tant issue. The Sahara is such a sen­si­tive issue that talking about it is always com­plex. The only people who talk about it are highly polarised and tend to per­pet­uate a dis­course and entrenched posi­tions. In the end, the lives, knowl­edge and sto­ries of the men and women who live there - and what their des­tiny should be - are always told by others. Others who don’t live there and who have often never even been there. Their posi­tion, how­ever well-meaning it may be, fur­ther reduces the inhab­i­tants of the Sahara to silence; they speak for them­selves. For my part, I’m trying to open a forum for expres­sion for the people who live there, even if that forum often becomes a forum for silence. Despite this silence, many things emerge and are passed on: the role of lan­guage, the rela­tion­ship with non-human ele­ments, poetry, but also geog­raphy, topog­raphy and veg­e­ta­tion. My pro­jects do not seek to fix a single dis­course or to take a sim­plistic stance. On the con­trary, they open a dia­logue with all the pos­si­bil­i­ties that entails. The obsta­cles are infinite because even this pos­tu­late, which tries to take a side­ways step, is imme­di­ately taken as "lacking iden­tity," what­ever the point of view. That’s what the informal col­lec­tive reproached me for, for example. So today, I’m no longer trying to get around the bar­riers but to inte­grate them into my pro­cess.

MB-D: Could you talk about the sound piece you pro­duced with Matthieu Guillin to accom­pany the Al Amakine instal­la­tion (2016-2020)? What sounds did you col­lect? How did you mix them? Some sounds seem to come from nature, wind, sand, and per­cus­sion and then there are voices, but every­thing is com­bined in such a way that nothing is recog­nis­able. There’s a kind of abstrac­tion based on things that are nonethe­less very real.

AEM: We wanted to work on the idea of breath­less­ness. Matthieu Guillin and I started by lis­tening to the con­ver­sa­tions I had recorded, in which the person being inter­viewed always gasps for breath and stops talking. This sen­sa­tion of breath­less­ness is also pre­sent in Hassaniya Arabic poetry when it is spoken. These are the kind of pas­sages that interest me very much in what they convey without saying, in what they say about the pow­er­less­ness of lan­guage. So that’s what we focused on, on those breaths that are cut off, on those moments when lan­guage feels like a frog in the throat. These breaths and inhala­tions form the basis of the piece. Then we opened this idea to the sounds of other recorded ele­ments, par­tic­u­larly the wind. At the same time, we worked with a plant that comes up a lot in my work: dagh­mous. The dagh­mous is one of the pro­tag­o­nists in the film Galb’Echaouf. In Hassaniya Arabic poetry, this euphorbia was open and flow­ering, then it devel­oped its cur­rent cactus-like form, as a response to the harsh external envi­ron­ment. Using spe­cial non-inva­sive micro­phones, we recorded the sounds made by the dagh­mous. These record­ings also form an impor­tant part of the Al Amakine sound piece. In a nut­shell, this sound piece is made up of muf­fled breaths, voice­less words and the sounds of the dagh­mous, the wind and the stones.

Émilie Renard: Faced with the inability of lan­guage to provide the facts, you turned to the cel­lular memory of the dagh­mous as another means of accessing his­tory. Can you describe how the dagh­mous also acts as a wit­ness to his­tory and its traumas, and what sto­ries it tells?

AEM: As far as I’m con­cerned, the dagh­mous is a plant that has lived through every­thing that has hap­pened on this land and has stayed put. In this sense, it is a wit­ness to be reck­oned with. Khadija, one of the char­ac­ters in the film Galb’Echaouf, encour­ages me to look for thorny plants and ruins, to listen to them and recon­struct specific events. Poetry tells us a great deal about these non-human iden­ti­ties, con­sid­ered to be indi­vid­uals in their own right in the Sahara, bearers and con­veyors of nar­ra­tives. All of this means that this plant plays a very impor­tant role. Like all the other plants I work with, they tell sto­ries, they per­ceive their envi­ron­ments, but they express them­selves in ways that escape us as humans.