The Human will that emerges from the indistinct
Artworks by Fathiya Tahiri and Mahi Binebine
Claudio Simeoni: Pagan religion in art.
Italian version: Mahi Binebine e Fathiya Tahiri at the 53rd Venice Biennale
The Moroccan pavilion
at the 53rd Venice Biennale presents two artists of great value,Fathiya Tahiri and Mahi Binebine.
These artists deal with the
theme of the mass as an indistinct ensemble of individuals, levelled by a society
that considers them only shapes without intelligence, will and personality.
This sense of flattening is perceived in our times by every culture like an oppression
of the emotional structure of people which must be deleted to get a compact ensemble
of depersonalizated individuals. Freud wrote about this denial of subjective personality
as if it were a need of civilization. The civilization, in order to exist and progress,
must feed itself with the denial of the individual and of his/her life tensions and impulses .
The civilization must reduce the individual into the mass, placed inside social
conventions after being forced to alienate him/herself from life and from growth impulses.
These artists
represent very well the objective situation of subjective flattening of individuals, through
an ensemble of masks whose faces want to remember an always present past that blocks the
way to every future.
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Masks that deny the growth. |
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In one sculpture, the keys in the mouth and the key that blocks the eye and the hands on the face
of the masks made by Binebine lock the mask-man to his future.
This idea of
massification as an alination from life and acceptance of a dominated social role
is frequent in modern art. This art symbolically represents this state of being
of men and of societies as an awareness of the man who lives in a world from which he feels
separated, locked in his role of mass individual, absolutely indistinct.
This being indistinct is well represented by the column of masks made by Binebine.
In this column, the massified ensemble is closed in itself.
Tahiri
represents through the metaphore of teeth the need of a massified system to
gobble up and destroy every "diversity". The teeth represent the
violence with which every social system takes possession of the emotionali impulses of people
destroying their personality and intelligence.
Very symbolical
and clear is the image of the teeth devouring a woman's body, a body deprived
of its head and personality, of intelligence and emotions, that is like a corpse
because it's deprived of the expressions through which it used to live in the world. Now
this body, deprived of the breath of life, offers itself like a Noemi to her
master Berlusconi.
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Like a Noemi to her master Berlusconi |
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In this representation of social flattening,
Binebine feels the efforts made by Human Beings in order to escape this flattening.
Binebine depicts some kind of eternal fight between a social system that feeds itself on the levelling of the individuals as non-persons and the tensions of life, that lead those non-persons to become persons and to establish themselves inside the social system and the world. This fight is unequal and the individual usually loses because he's alone in perceiving the possibility of freedom from levelling.
So Binebine's white figures
wiggle, climb, act between the tight walls of social levelling made of levelled men's masks.
These figures emerge like ghosts from an indistinct emotional ground noise. While emerging,
they don't show the direction toward which they emerge, nor an ideology of emerging.
They just show their need of emerging from a massification perceived as oppressive
and unnatural.
Binebine's representation
is true for every country in the world, where the emotional impulse to egress is
indipendent of the culture and of the reasons explaining this need. This is because
this impulse that express itself in the Beings of Nature is an impulse divine in itself,
apart from its representations, justifications, spreadings made by Human Beings
in different cultures, times, subjective conditions.
From a Pagan religious point of view I must say that Binebine and Tahiri
understand the horror of massification that turns the multiplicity of Human Beings
into one subject to which Human Beings must submit. The multiplicity is
deprived of its characteristics through violence, in order to be reduced to
one same moral, preception, wishes, that become wishes, moral and perception
of a unique ensemble as a model to be gobbled up.
To be gobbled up
at any cost. To be gobbled up with the violence of the teeth that engulves and devours every emotion.
This is what the Musée Hassan in
Rabat tells us through the artists Fathiya Tahiri and Mahi Binebine.
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This is what Fathiya Tahiri and Mahi Binebine tell us. |
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There is a situation that is worth remembering: how many people coming from Morocco underwent
attempts of violence and abuses of power in Veneto. In Veneto the word "Moroccan"
often means "beggar, pusher, rapist" and not simply "person coming from Morocco".
How much violence has been used by venetian people to turn Moroccan people into individuals
levelled to the catholic fundamentalist reality in Veneto. In Veneto, the Italian
Constitution itself has been violated and insulted in order to homologate people coming
from Morocco and Arabian countries, with the help of Authorities who preferred to turn their
heads away and avoid seeing the violence. They almost denied the right to pray to muslim people
in Veneto as if it were a right of christian fundamentalists to drive a cross in their hearts.
Prefects, chiefs of police, magistrates pretended not to see and so became partners in crime.
This is the reason why we can't avoid to see in Binebine's artworks the expression
of the violence imposed on citizens from Morocco or from Arabian conutries, that is actually
a violence imposed on all the citizens on the Earth!
Emerging from homologation
is something sacred and fundamental according to the Polytheistic Pagan Religion, and so
are sacred the needs of those Human Beings who, apart from their culture or religion,
always have the tension that urges inside them to hold up the sky of knowledge
and awareness, apart from the way in which they describe that sky!
Note: the Moroccan pavilion
is in the church of Maria della Pietà (Mary of Pity) in Riva degli Schiavoni,
Castello 3701 and will be opened until the 22nd November 2009.
Marghera, 11th June 2009
Claudio Simeoni
Mechanic
Apprentice Sorcerer
Keeper of the Antichrist
E-MAIL:
claudiosimeoni@libero.it
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