Memory and Disappearance

A sound piece follows, focusing on the memory of childhood: the period of life during which, according to Pauline Oliveros, a pioneer of electronic music, our relationship with sounds as the language of emotions is formed, as is our capacity for Deep Listening (6). For the piece No wrong sounds, Brahim returned to a practice from her childhood, tap-dancing, and worked with a group of tap-dancing students under the age of 10. She gave them simple tasks, such as standing in a circle and performing the rhythm of their own heart or the sound of a river. Of course, everyone dances to their own inner sound, as they also seek to tune in to each other, creating a form of harmony. All these movements also left a radial trace on the floor, like an imprint on the exhibition landscape.
This journey into buried memory continues with a light installation, The Lightroom. Its hypnotic pulsation of light takes the viewer back to a very personal form of trance, but also to the beam of lighthouses projected into distant waters. And it’s to the ocean’s edge that we continue with the video installation Adagio. On one side we see the artist walking extremely slowly along the ocean’s edge, with a camera mounted on her diaphragm, while on the other we see the sea filmed by this camera, breathing at the artist’s pace. Her body is transformed into an instrument of synchronization with the shutter, and breathing gives rhythm to the elements. The artist becomes a vector of vulnerability and connection, taking almost literally the words of Astrida Neimanis, a theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmentalism: “For us humans, the flow and flush of waters sustain our own bodies, but also connect them to other bodies, to other worlds beyond our human selves. Indeed, bodies of water undo the idea that bodies are necessarily or only human.” (7)
We then move through a series of photographs that seem to be the research collection assembled to make these works, isolating precise moments when the body is sometimes evanescent, evaporating in the landscape, sometimes caught up in the material, in total fusion with the rocks or the earth. The last work in the exhibition, the video installation He said, we must forget, presents two films running in parallel.
Using images collected over the course of an entire year, two films intersect and oppose each other, one undoing what the other brings forward, with a technique based on hand-painting. Through fragments of images, of sensations, Brahim tries to understand how we involuntarily forget certain things to move ahead, how our memories become blocked, block our access to memories: how do we go back? How do we separate memory and imagination? “To be born is to be nothing other than a reconfiguration, a metamorphosis, of something other. To be born [...] means having to construct, to build one’s own body from the Earth, from all the matter available on this planet of which we are both the modification and the expression, both an articulation and an unfolding. To be born is to be made of the same material from which all things before us were made.” (8)