I grew up in a house that was always being renovated. It was a never-ending process of small repairs after small repairs, it was endless. Later, I discovered Leonardo da Vinci's Non finito. I was blown away. It resonated deeply with my daily environment. Even today it is one of my greatest sources of inspiration.
Nothing in this house was clear: raw materials were mixed together in what we would call today an aesthetic of chaos. Clay bricks, cement blocks, copper pipes running through the living room: the masterpiece of my father and his cronies.Yet one thing was very clear: the images of the Algerian football match on the TV screen. The satellite dish was the only thing in the house that was perfectly in place.
The sharpness of these images from elsewhere, the illumination of the television screen in the night, represented for my father, uprooted, an authentic connection to his native land.
In Arabic, the term "parabole" is called "qamas sinai". This could be translated literally as "artificial moons".
After Ostraca, “ Lunes Industrielles “ is the second chapter of my project “ mythology of the periphery “.
The parabola dish, totemic object, symbolizes, in my opinion, the tension between “here” and “elsewhere”, but also the democratization of images as well as their subjugation to a hegemonic model, a form of new colonization.
It combines my intimate history with an aesthetic fascination. Its concave form within my project is used not as a receiver but as a transmitter of a video projection.
As I explore the topic more deeply, I realize that in Morocco, until quite recently, capturing images from elsewhere, this time from the West, was the privilege of the king.
Whereas in France, the peripheral towers were used to support satellite dishes, over there, only one place held this power of capture, his throne: the royal palace. At the same time, the local population developed resistance techniques based on hijacking, using the couscous pots erected on the roofs of houses as receivers. This telematic piracy was the first step towards a democratization movement such as no pre- or post-independence discourse had ever been able to create.
The blurred images gained in definition: « female nudity descended from the roofs and penetrated the intimacy of homes in the middle of the afternoon. » The authorities tried to organize this chaos and keep it under control; it was even referred to as a « paradiabolic » phenomenon.
The parable abolished the question of boundaries between center and periphery within the Arab territories themselves. Certain marginalized geographical areas found in these images an answer to their need for socialization. This reappropriation of an everyday industrial artefact and a foodstuff at that fuelled a thirst for cultural openness.
