ALI CHERRI

WINNER OF A SILVER LION AT THE VENICE BIENNALE, THE LEBANESE-BORN ARTIST CAUSED A STIR AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL WITH HIS FIRST FEATURE, THE DAM. WE SPOKE TO HIM ON THE OCCASION OF A NEW EXHIBITION AT TWO MUSEUMS IN MARSEILLE.

Cecilia Alemani: Let’s start with the multimedia piece you show at the Venice Biennale. What was its genesis?

Ali Cherri: It began by thinking about the elements, not just their materiality but also their history. Take water – there are stories around it, there’s imagery, mythology. Water is life, but it’s also the deluge, destruction, rivers… So elements are political and social entities. I started getting interested in what might happen when two elements come together – earth and water, with their complexities and histories. Mix earth and water, you get mud. Mud has been present since the birth of humanity. Humans used it to make their first vessels, houses and even gods. We imagined that souls were created from mud. I’m thinking about Adam, but also further back, to the golems or even Gilgamesh, this idea of mud that brings life. That was the entry point, thinking about materiality as a tool for understanding historical events.

And that led to a big project, right? Not just your work in Venice, but also the feature-length film. Could you

say more about the film itself, both in Venice and the longer version for film festivals?

From the beginning I had the idea of working on two projects in parallel, like a three-channel video installation and a feature film. For the feature film, it’s much more anchored in political reality, a very specific political moment and geographical place. We’re in Northern Sudan at a dam that is considered one of the most destructive hydroelectric projects ever undertaken. There was no scientific assessment prior to its building, and it really destroyed the landscape, the whole ecology around it, as well as people’s lives. The authorities wanted to resettle the residents, tribes who’d been living there for thousands of years, but they refused to leave. So the government opened the dam and flooded the whole area – people were still in their houses when the waters started rising, they barely had time to rescue a few possessions. It was a very traumatic and violent event. People died during demonstrations against the government. Today, all we see is a beautiful lake in a beautiful landscape: the whole history of violence has been dissimulated, it’s invisible. If we start to look at the elements, they can reveal this violence, this history. It’s like a materiality of history, history read through its material manifestation.

I wanted to ask about the symbolic value of mud.

On my first trip to Sudan, walking along the Nile, I met these mud-brick workers. And I found it quite interesting how they still make bricks the traditional way, as has been done for thousands of years, by hand, the same repetitive gestures, which inscribe their bodies in a vast history. But they’re also inscribed in an economic reality: there’s the boss who owns the brickyard, they have to work, they get their salary, they have to sell the bricks, it’s a form of exploitative labour. How do you mix these very different levels? The whole process is at once poetic and economic.

Both in your Venice installation and your work in general, you find a seamless way of merging fact and

hardship of their reality. And I play with this: we start with something completely anchored in reality and slowly fiction is introduced, then we move to the super fiction, to the monsters and creatures and golems, this imaginary world. These fictions are important to tell us how to make our reality more livable and bearable – artists have been doing this for a very long time. I think there’s something with this gesture of creation. Imagine that mud, all of a sudden life begins, someone breathed into the nostrils and it lived. I think it’s about believing in magic, in the possibilities of the politics of magic. It’s not like there’s poetry on one side and politics on the other. For me it’s very important these two projects come together: we cannot think the world without thinking of the imageries of the world.

I’m curious to hear about your experience working with the archive at the National Gallery in London.

The National Gallery residency was also a very pivotal moment. The invitation was to create work in dialogue with the collection. What can I bring to the dialogue? What’s the importance of my voice in this kind of institution? So I started digging in the archives and, of course, the question of the museum as a political site came up, but also the eruption of violence as a protest. The National Gallery’s archives contain detailed reports of incidents of vandalism that happened there, paintings that were attacked, not only damage reports but also news clippings. That’s an interesting entry point for me, looking at why someone would decide to walk into the museum and destroy a work of art. Is it political or personal? I worked on five paintings that were vandalized at the National Gallery, but my real focus was institutional response to violence: what does the institution do when these things happen? Interestingly, the National Gallery’s policy is never to show any pictures of a damaged painting. It’s like the faster we erase this event the better. They erase it as if nothing happened, but you cannot unwrite violence. When something is subject to violence, its aura changes.

After we humans are subjected to violence, we’re not the same person anymore. I think there’s also something essential in these artworks that has changed. Take the Rokeby Venus by Velázquez, slashed by a suffragette in 1914. A century later, the paint that was used to restore the picture has aged differently – the painting’s wounds are starting to resurface. I found this a very beautiful, emotive metaphor for trauma that keeps coming back to the surface.

You’re also interested in how museums build historical narratives around objects.

Yes, especially how national museums, through a display of objects, build a story of the nation, the mythological birth of the nation and the glory of the nation. I started looking at archaeological and historical objects and I was interested in some that are of lesser value or objects that are too damaged to be part of a museum collection. I started collecting these objects, buying them at auction and then bringing them back inside the museum so that they become intruders in the dominant history told by the museum. I see them as broken bodies that come together to constitute a community that enters the museum and tries to make the dominant story more complex.

What about your project at the Musée des Beaux-arts and the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Marseille?

In Marseilie I was interested in grafting, like in botany when you graft two different plant species – they grasp one another and create new life. For Marseille, I was interested in a dialogue between the natural-history museum and the fine-arts museum. Why do all these animals enter one while culture enters the other? It’s a concrete demonstration of the whole separation between nature and culture and how Western production of knowledge is built on this dichotomy. The two museums occupy the same building but they never collaborate. So my idea was to bring these stuffed animals inside the Musée des Beaux-arts.