Abdessamad El Montassir, Trab’ssahl

Trab’ssahl means "The Land of the West" in Hassanya and refers to a large part of Sahrawi ter­ri­tory. It is on this land, in this lan­guage, in the largely ignored his­tory of an unin­ter­rupted con­flict for nearly 50 years, between sovereignty and autonomy, that Abdessamad El Montassir’s work is anchored. “All that we have expe­ri­enced, we cannot say. Ask the ruins, ask the desert and its thorny plants. They have seen and expe­ri­enced every­thing, they have remained in place. We no longer have the words.” These are the words of Khadija who left her nomadic life for the city in 1975. Powerful though idle, they set out for Abdessamad El Montassir a pro­gramme he has been car­rying out since 2015: how to show what cannot be seen, how to listen to what cannot be said? What hap­pens to pre­vented and con­fis­cated mem­o­ries? What form should oblivion take? In response to the col­lec­tive amnesia that haunts the Sahara in South Morocco, Abdessamad El Montassir pro­poses to listen to the silent voices, the resis­tant poetry, the winds and the sand, the toponymy, to observe resilient plants and to detect every­where the signs of a trau­matic memory. Whether they are human or non-human voices, they become wit­nesses, even if only par­tially, to those who are able to listen.

View from the exhibition « Trab’ssahl » by Abdessamad El Montassir, Bétonsalon – centre d’art et de recher­che, Paris, 2023 © ADAGP, Paris, 2023 / Abdessamad El Montassir. Photos : Aurélien Mole

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The exhi­bi­tion is sup­ported by the ADAGP - French visual artists’ rights man­age­ment organ­i­sa­tion, within the frameof the ADAGP / Bétonsalon research grant of which the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou is a partner; the inter­na­tional res­i­dency pro­gramme at the Centre d’accueil et d’échanges des Récollets of the City of Paris; the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart and the Maison Salvan, Labège.

ABDESSAMAD EL MONTASSIR

Born in 1989.
Lives and works between Boujdour and Marseille.

Abdessamad El Montassir’s research focuses on a trilogy: the right to forget, fic­tional and vis­ceral nar­ra­tives, and antic­i­pa­tory trauma.

Abdessamad El Montassir is a grad­uate of the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan, as well as of the master’s degree in Artistic Production and Aesthetic Education at the École Normale Supérieure in Meknes.
From 2017 to 2020, he is an asso­ciate researcher at IMéRA - Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Aix-Marseille.

He has par­tic­i­pated in sev­eral national and inter­na­tional exhi­bi­tions, including Mémoire des cen­dres curated by Paul de Sorbier at La Maison Salvan in Labège, Ce qui s’oublie et ce qui reste curated by Meriem Berrada and Isabelle Renard at the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris, Les Sentinelles curated by Pascale Cassagnau, Camille Leprince and Françoise Cohen at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Tourcoing, Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono for the 13th Rencontres de Bamako, The Promise of Grass curated by Adwait Singh for the 5th Mardin Biennial, Quand je n’aurai plus de feuille curated by Gabrielle Camuset at La Villa du Parc in Annemasse, Demain c’est seule­ment dans un jour curated on line by Taous R. Dahamni for Le Jeu de Paume Lab, About Now at the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery in Dakar, Surgir des cen­dres as part of Chroniques - bien­nale des imag­i­naires numériques in Aix-Marseille, Invisible curated by Alya Sebti for the 13th Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar and the ifa-Galerie in Berlin, Leave No Stone Unturned curated by Clelia Coussonnet at the Cube - inde­pen­dent art room in Rabat, De liens et d’exils at La Villa Empain - Fondation Boghossian in Brussels, Saout Africa(s) in the frame­work of doc­u­menta 14 at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin.

Abdessamad El Montassir has also taken part in sev­eral artistic res­i­den­cies including the Solitude Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, the Art, Science and Society Programme at IMéRA in Marseille, and more recently, the A.I.R pro­gramme at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton.

Abdessamad El Montassir © Franck Alix & La Cinémathèque de Toulouse.