TANGIER.- Abdelkader Benchamma’s solo exhibition “Œuvre Croisée” opened on July 1st, 2023 at Librairie des Colonnes in Tanger, Morocco. Founded in 1949, Librairie des Colonnes is a historic and iconic place that welcomed famous writers such as Beckett, Genet, and Kerouac. In 2010, it was taken over by Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent.

“This unpublished series of drawings is inspired by the book Third Mind, a cult work of graphic and literary experiments carried out by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in Paris in the 1960s. Translated into French as Le Tiers-Esprit in 1977.

During these sessions, it would seem that voices other than those of the two protagonists appeared. Burroughs thought Gysin had such an idea, while Gysin was sure it came from Burroughs. Then they decided that these intuitions did not come from one or the other: their two minds seemed to create another entity, the third-mind. A voice that would somehow be greater than the sum of their two minds. It is the Crosswork, or The Third Mind.

This book helped and inspired me enormously during my last years of study at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. I had decided to stop painting, and it offered me a new world; graphic, conceptual and at the same time mysterious. Burroughs and Gysin seemed to track, through their collages, that mysterious baseline of chance, when coincidences become too numerous to be mere synchronicities. By cutting out press articles and their own poems, Burroughs and Gysin explode the very notion of author, of the beginning and end of a work. Above all, by cutting up the sentences, it is the very structures of language that are deformed, exploded and laid bare.

Today, 20 years later I revisit them, only to discover to see that their power is still intact. My drawings resume their collages to then move towards other forms and other memories. Cut-ups from other cut-ups. The possibilities of permutations are endless. Infinite images and newspaper clippings cover the old walls with no beginning or end. "Am I an octopus?" writes Burroughs while putting together these collage pages.

These drawings are both a tribute and an inspiration, they are the result of another voice, born from the voices that have now disappeared in today's Tangier. »

Abdelkader Benchamma
Solo exhibition: “Œuvre Croisée”
July 1st, 2023 - September 1st, 2023