CHOUROUK HRIECH URBAN NAVIGATION

Chourouk Hriech’s black and white drawings map intersecting temporalities and heterogeneous spaces. Her cities are palimpsests of mutations, rendering an experience of space that is both corporeal and mental, where memories and fantasies are interwoven with the real.

She begins by physically pacing cities and the distances between them. Marseille, where Chourouk Hriech lives, and cities she has visited: Barcelona, Casablanca, Paris and Rabat. Her walks are full of bifurcations and visual surprises, encounters and memories. Here, to quote Gilles Deleuze, “The trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity of those who travel through a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who travel through it.”(1) This is an occasion to photograph buildings and ornamentations, along with animals, plants and individual people. By transposing these snapshots into drawings, she develops a vocabulary of urban, natural and cultural forms which she then combines in hybrid compositions, a mix of drawings reproducing the images she collects from various publications and her own personal bestiary. This is a corporal and phantasmal apprehension of space reproduced on paper, wood or walls. It’s no accident that in making her wall drawings, Hriech recreates the rhythm of her urban perambulations, even singing and dancing to revisit her initial sensations and impressions.

CARTOGRAPHIES

Discontinuous, made of elements of diverse origins, often switching scale and viewpoint, Hriech’s drawings constitute cartographies of territories simultaneously experienced and imagined. She likes to remind us that a map is never a simple mimetic instrument but always a constructive system. This is particularly evident in her series of thirteen drawings on paper of the construction of Paris’s third streetcar line ( Chemin, 2009). They combine pedestrian crosswalks and ships seen in Marseille, Barcelona, Rabat and Casablanca, trees and metal structures, bulldogs and eagles, workers on the job and a daydreaming young woman, neoclassical and modern buildings.

HETEROTOPIAS

Palimpsests of temporalities and heteroclite spaces, conjoining fragments of historical and contemporary constructions, real and fictional, Hriech’s drawings are heterotopias.(2) More precisely, during the artist’s travels the sedimented collective memory of cities becomes interwoven with her own recollections of towns and landscapes she has seen or read about. It is this stratification of apparently incompatible times and places, active in the here and now, that marks Hriech’s work. Take, for instance, her triptych on wood, Windows Painting (2010), where huge freighters coexist with Chinese pagodas, the seawalls of the port in Marseille, floating buildings, a bridge found in a book, and winches being used in Rabat. Stratification is also suggested by a series of wood sculptures called Un air de disque (2010). Each is made up of a stack of several large disks, their sides painted black or white. As if they were sedimentary layers of social, individual and historical factoids, on top of each stack is a drawing of a 360° panoramic view, a vertiginous spiral of disparate urban, natural and cultural elements.

FUTURES

Hriech’s kaleidoscopic, polycentric visions seem to move in several directions at once. They are like frescos of some simultaneously personal and collective future. With their violent and dynamic intercutting of heterogeneous spaces and temporalities, these drawings are narratives of a conti- nuous motion—incessant configurations and reconfigurations of cities and psychoaffective life. This is particularly implied by the particles surrounding certain decorative and structural fragments. We’re not sure if they signify disintegration or on the contrary, formation. A more abstract incessant mutation is suggested by the series of drawings on paper entitled Bruit du silence (2010). Traversed by contradictory forces, geometric shapes that look like parts of a building pile up and crash into one another, creating bursts of black powder. With her mapping of ephemeral conjunctures of buildings, landscapes, plants and real or fictional characters, all in a perpetual state of metamorphosis, constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed from one drawing to the next, Hriech produces individual mythographies of a world incessantly on the move. (1) Gilles Deleuze, Essays: Critical and Clinical, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 61. (2) Concept laid out by Foucault in his lecture of March 14, 1967 in Paris entitled “Des espaces autres.”

Sarah Ihler-Meyer is an art historian and critic.