PARIS.- Abdessamad El Montassir's exhibition Trab'ssahl, currently on view at the Bétonsalon Centre D'Art, will be open until July 13th.

Trab’ssahl means «The Land of the West» in Hassanya and refers to a large part of Sahrawi territory. It is on this land, in this language, in the largely ignored history of an uninterrupted conflict for nearly 50 years, between sovereignty and auto­ nomy, that Abdessamad El Montassir’s work is anchored. “All that we have expe­ rienced, we cannot say. Ask the ruins, ask the desert and its thorny plants. They have seen and experienced everything, they have remained in place. We no lon­ ger have the words.” These are the words of Khadija who left her nomadic life for the city in 1975. Powerful though idle, they set out for Abdessamad El Montassir a programme he has been carrying out since 2015 : how to show what cannot be seen, how to listen to what cannot be said ? What happens to prevented and confiscated memories ? What form should oblivion take ? In response to the col­ lective amnesia that haunts the Sahara in South Morocco, Abdessamad El Montassir proposes to listen to the silent voices, the resistant poetry, the winds and the sand, the toponymy, to observe resilient plants and to detect everywhere the signs of a traumatic memory. Whether they are human or non­human voices, they become witnesses, even if only partially, to those who are able to listen.

Originally from Boujdour, in the Sahara in southern Morocco, Abdessamad El Montassir anchors in this territory an investigative work that he has been deve­ loping since 2015, opening up spaces of negotiation between unfathomable wounds and a univocal conflictual History. Taking the Sahara as the main site of investigation, this long­term research is articulated around three axes ­ the right to forget, fictional and visceral narratives and anticipatory trauma. In a writing that is both poetic and documentary, El Montassir evokes the invisibi­ lity of the history of the Sahara, its traumas and their transmissions. Engaged in an interdisciplinary practice, he brings together multiple visions through testimonies and meetings with historians, scientists, activists and citizens, and relatives. Alongside them, he collects muffled words, sketched gestures, incom­ plete poems as snippets of a narrative with multiple voices that had not been transmitted until then. He draws trajectories of individual and collective iden­ tities in response to a lack of narratives. He seeks to measure the amnesia that haunts this territory through its echoes in living organisms, to perceive its traces on a microscopic scale as well as on a landscape scale. Thus, his projects do not freeze a single narrative but, on the contrary, invite the necessary and continuous emergence of new questions and new ways of seeing.

With the support this year of the ADAGP / Bétonsalon research and produc­ tion grant, of which he is a laureate, he has extended his research based on the publication «Necessità dei volti», a copy of which is in the Kandinsky Library collection. Composed by the Informal Collective, this «involuntary archive», in their words, is made up of 483 images chosen from a collection of photographs collected by the Polisario Front on Moroccan soldiers taken prisoner or fallen in combat, which make up the collection of the Sahrawi War Museum in Tindouf, Algeria.




The exhibition is supported by the ADAGP ­ French visual artists’ rights managements organisation, within the frameof the ADAGP / Bétonsalon research grant of which the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou is a partner ; the international residency programme at the Centre d’accueil et d’échanges des Récollets of the City of Paris ; the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart and the Maison Salvan, Labège.

Biography

Abdessamad El Montassir was born in 1989 in Boujdour, Morocco, and currently lives and works between Boujdour and Rabat. His research focuses on a trilogy that the artist has been has been forging since 2015: the right to forget, fictional and visceral narratives, and anticipatory trauma.

Abdessamad El Montassir is a graduate of the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan, as well as of the master’s degree in Artistic Production and Aesthetic Education at the École Normale Supérieure de Meknès.

He has participated in several national and international exhibitions, including Ce qui s’oublie et ce qui reste curated by Meriem Berrada and Isabelle Renard at the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris, The Promise of Grass curated by Adwait Singh for the 5th Mardin Biennial, Quand je n’aurai plus de feuille curatée by Gabrielle Camuset at La Villa du Parc in Annemasse, Demain c’est seulement dans un jour curatée en ligne by Taous R. Dahamni for Le Jeu de Paume Lab, About Now at the Cécile Fakhoury gallery in Dakar, Surgir des cendres as part of Chroniques ­ biennale des imaginaires numériques in Aix­Marseille, Invisible curated by Alya Sebti for the 13th Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar and the ifa­Galerie in Berlin, Leave No Stone Unturned curated by Clelia Coussonnet at the Cube ­ independent art room in Rabat, De liens et d’exils at La Villa Empain ­ Fondation Boghossian in Brussels, Al Amakine as part of the 11th Rencontres de Bamako, Saout Africa(s), as part of documenta 14 at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, Home for the Mediterranea 18 Young Artists Biennale in Tirana and Durrës, Don’t Agonize, Organize at Poppositions in Brussels, Dissolving your ear plugs / Retirez vos bouchons d’oreilles, at Musée d’Art de Joliette, Québec, curated by Maud Jacquin and Anne­Marie St­Jean Aubre .

Abdessamad El Montassir has also taken part in several artistic residencies: Solitude Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Art, Science and Society Programme at IMéRA in Marseille, La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the summer’s lab at the Cube ­ independent art room in Rabat, La Résidence Méditerranée at La Friche La Belle de Mai in Marseille. As an integral part of his research, Abdessamad El Montassir regularly speaks at conferences and for institutions.

A first part of the exhibition takes place at the Musée d’Art de Joliette, Quebec:
Dissolving your ear plugs / Retirez vos bouchons d’oreilles Curators: Maud Jacquin and Anne­Marie St­Jean Aubre From June 11 to September 4, 2023