Workshop "Backwater" by Ali Cherri

Backwater

Maekawa Saori – DR, The City Museum of Rikuzentakata submerged following the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami.
The handwritten note writes: "Please do not take the museum’s collections away. They are important treasures that will enable us to restore our the environment, history, and culture of Takata. (City Board of Education)”

A work­shop led by Ali Cherri, in the con­text of the Académie vivante 4
In col­lab­o­ra­tion with ESADTPM and the Réseau Cinéma
From December 12 to 15, 2017 at Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research

Insects and small ani­mals of all types are buzzing above stag­nant and muddy waters, giving us a mul­ti­lay­ered pic­ture of a gloomy and dull misery, both inva­sive and dis­turbing. Masses of mud, shape­less but not amor­phous, engulf and cor­rode every­thing.

Very few spaces embody the periphery of human exis­tence as well as swamps. Neither quite land nor water, swamps have long been con­sid­ered dreaded spaces, places with unknown dan­gers from which "miasma" and "scents" escape. Their waters would be fun­da­men­tally con­tam­i­nated and dan­gerous spaces, enig­matic and ghostly land­scapes that would cause death and dis­ease.

Under the direc­tion of the artist Ali Cherri, the work­shop takes as starting point the imag­i­nary around mud as an ele­ment that is cor­ro­sive but from which life can grow nonethe­less. It will engage with mud-filled spaces such as the Fukushima archae­l­og­ical museum buried after the tsunami, the Merowe dam on the Nile in Sudan, or the Louvre’s storage spaces after the 2016 flood. During four days, the issue of dirty water and pure water will be addressed through a pro­gram of films, texts, and visits to cul­tural or nat­ural sites.




Ali Cherri is a video and visual artist. His recent pro­ject looks at the place of the archae­o­log­ical object in the con­struc­tion of his­tor­ical nar­ra­tives. His solo exhi­bi­tions include Dénaturé at Galerie Imane Farès, Paris (2017); Somniculus at Jeu de Paume, Paris and CAPC, Bordeaux (2017); From Fragment to Whole at Jönköpings Läns Museum, Sweden (2017); A Taxonomy of Fallacies at Sursock Museum, Beirut (2016). His work has been exhib­ited in inter­na­tional museums amongst them Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); MAXXI, Rome (2017); Le MACVAL, Val-de-Marne (2017); Guggenheim, New York (2016); Aichi Triennial, Japan (2016); Gwangju Museum of Art, Gwangju (2016). He’s the recip­ient of Harvard University’s Robert E. Fulton Fellowship (2016) and Rockefeller Foundation Award (2017).