Younès Rahmoun: Little Worlds, Complex Structures

LAURA BARLOW (LB): Jabal-Hajar-Turâb #11 is the grounding work in the exhibition. It began a number of years ago and has been made in various iterations across different countries and exhibitions. What are the original references and meanings for you in the work?

YOUNES RAHMOUN (YR): Jabal-Hajar-Turâb began in 2009 at the Marakesh Biennale in Morocco. I showed it with elements of another work, Ghorfa, with three trees, some earth from the Rif, and a small maquette Ghorfa. One year later I showed it in Palermo, Italy, at the invitation of Abdellah Karroum.

Jabal-Hajar-Turâb stems from a desire to develop an existing project of exchanging stones into something larger, so the project takes its meaning, origins, and title, from the mountain, stone, and earth.

LB: Why were you drawn to working with these three materials at the beginning of the project – was it connected to a desire to investigate the place you are from?

YR: I wanted to talk about my origins but also the movement in my story. My grandfather came from the Rif Mountains to the city of Tetouan in Morocco as a soldier in the Spanish military. There he married my grandmother starting our family story in Tetouan. Immigration is still a part of my family’s story, and in the project I refer to this movement undertaken by humans, planets, and the earth’s elements in the universe. The work is about the matter that composes the universe that is also responsible for changing it.

LB: In your work there is a presence of architecture and a pragmatic and spiritual reading of spaces of habitation from an individual and collective perspective. One element of Jabal-Hajar-Turâb is about the construction of the houses in the Rif Mountains. How did that investigation begin?

YR: Jabal-Hajar-Turâb makes a connection between this part of the world, a precise point, and the universe. With the video Ghorfa 4 that is in Jabal-Hajar-Turâb I talk about the architecture and constriction in the Rif Mountains, looking at why people started to make houses with modern materials that came from the cities. When I made the Ghorfa structure – which the video documents the making of – I tried to use strong materials from this place in a way that was critical but intended to suggest some solutions to the issue of old and new.

LB: You’ve described Jabal-Hajar-Turâb as a work that shapes an external connection and Markaba igniting an introspective experience. How does Markaba operate as both an object and a tool to read small worlds within the larger structure of the universe?

YR: Markaba is a perfect mathematically designed geometric form; it’s almost industrial. Jabal-Hajar-Turâb is organic and natural; the small elements, the stones, travel around the world and exchange. It’s more intimate and the drawing on the wall is also something really organic. Markaba has a specific form but it’s also more philosophic, a more conceptual abstract object, like a stone, like a plant. But there is still a connection between them.

LB: Does Markaba have an experiential function?

YR: In the beginning, Markaba expanded from the black box, the camera obscura. The camera obscura receives light through a single, small hole. In Markaba there are six holes, or five points and a sixth hole positioned facing the ground that is the entrance. Inside, one sees five sources of light through the five holes. In the sixth hole the light comes from the front, behind, right, left, up, and down. It’s from the future, the past, the east, the west, the north, and the south.

Markaba represents the two elements of time and space with the six directions of light. This camera obscura can’t give us a picture, or an image inside the box, but when we are inside, in the center, it gives us an idea of being between the future and the past, between the north and the south, the east and the west. I am in the center, you are in the center – we are each in the center in the world, in this universe, in the past, the present, and the future. When one exists, we are in the center of our past, time, and place.

LB: You made Khamsa in five different locations, one of them being Doha. How is this work about individual agency in the world and the right to self-expression?

YR: For many years my work has referred to the problems and concerns of people around me in my country or other places around the world. I started making Khamsa in 2011 when I was in Doha for a workshop at Mathaf. I saw what was happening in Egypt and Tunisia as reported by Al Jazeera and wanted to make something related to this reportage.

In the film I perform many characters, starting with myself an artist and a teacher, but I also imagine myself as a lawyer, an architect, and a politician – for example, perspectives or positions that we can all summon. Each character is given five minutes to express ideas on how to change the world. I held the camera in my left hand and used my right hand to control what was in front of me, suggesting that there are multiple lenses through which to see and read what is happening around us, and that we can all be agents of change and expression, to shape the formation of unassuming found objects as well as the world more generally. I only saw my hand through the camera, just as we saw Al Jazeera’s reportage of the events in Cairo and other places where political unrest and revolutions were taking place.