Bouchra Khalili, Unpredictable cartographies –
Here and there
Pascale Cassagnau
(excerpt, p. 37-38)
(...)
For many years already, the association
between contemporary art and the
documentary has turned out to be particularly
fruitful. The document and the archives as
question and method have established a
real horizon of thought for contemporary
creation. The emergence of the document in
the economy of knowledge modifies – and
has modified throughout the 20th century –
the status of memory. As a matter of fact,
the image endows memory with a support,
a prism of reflection, which focuses on the
object of the memory and on the memory of
the object. Besides, the document generates
types of assemblings and editings which are
the supports for the elaborations of stories, for
historicisation forms. Besides, the elaboration
of archives crosses an interrogation on History
and on the peculiar and personal stories. The
territory of the documentary then indicates a
way of making movies shared by artists and
film-makers: that is to say a non-linear way to
organise the cinematic elements, away from the
strictly narrative structures.
A founding member of the “Cinémathèque
de Tanger” with the artist
Yto
Barrada in
particular, Bouchra Khalili works on the
borderline between visual arts and cinema.
Her films – installations or movies – relating
to documentary essays, in the fragmentary sense of the term, deals with the notions of
movement, relation and distance, between
physical and imaginary geographies. With
the form of short stories, these short movies
establish systems of notations, as visual
phrases, involving writing and language, meant
to decipher signs found in urban spaces or
in landscapes. The notations are articulated
with descriptions, as tools for decoding and
interpreting with images.
(...)
