Mariam Abouzid Souali, Stardust: we are stardust
With the exhibition Stardust, painter Mariam Abouzid Souali enters a new cycle - but doubtless not the last - in a broader reflection on the place of the individual in globalization. A hard-won and hard-negotiated place for the citizen of the global South, which is often embodied in her imposing paintings, allowing us to measure ourselves against numerous figures (hand games, gaze games) but also against a multi-perspective space, in which her societal frescoes take shape (to understand in this term both the utopian and political connotation and the particular virtue of representing and speaking to the man/woman of the people).
Mariam Abouzid Souali was born in Targuist (population 14,000), located in the heart of the Rif, in the western part of the province of Al-Hoceïma, in the shadow of major cities such as Tangier and Tétouan, where she not only studied (at the Institut National des Beaux-Arts) but still maintains a studio. During the Spanish protectorate, Targuist played a key role in the Rif war, as the second office (after Ajdir) of Abdelkrim El Khattabi's resistance army, where he was taken prisoner by the French in 1926. But above all, it's an extremely young town, like the rest of the country, where a quarter of the population is under the age of 15, and which still bears the scars of illegal migration to France and Spain.
The figure of the child (or even the adolescent), which populates almost all of Abouzid Souali's work, also takes on a new dimension in his latest productions and for the Stardust exhibition. The child generally assumes the double mask of innocence and knowledge (he/she who wanders and seeks knowledge in the same movement). Not established or encyclopedic knowledge, but the paths of intuition and becoming, the pure, interest-free experience embodied by the incorruptible child. Like the angels in Italian Renaissance painting, the children portrayed by Abouzid Souali have no assigned functions, but can take on roles (the orator, the musician, the merciful...) and above all manage to cast their indiscreet gaze where no one else goes (they wander more or less aimlessly, sometimes focused on a game, sometimes left to their own devices).
And yet, the Stardust exhibition and the paintings on show turn this child into a top-level athlete, capable of overcoming mountains and reaching for the stars; not to say superheroes, whereas Abouzid Souali's early paintings showed us more anti-heroes or children with toys. The rowers and footballers, their bodies unbound in weightlessness and dedicated to surpassing themselves in the high jump, long jump and hurdle race, are projected, at the peak of their physical effort, as if into a vortex mixing earth, sea and sky. More precisely, between the industrialized world and the astral world. On the one hand, there are the huge container ships and freighters, where electricity, mining and gas infrastructures can be erected. These containers, which usually represent the invisible face of the flow of goods in the neoliberal economy, are put back at the heart of the narrative and the visual device by the painter: she can arrange them with the landscape and the characters, using them as a border, a framing effect, a window or a disruptive element between the second and third dimensions. The omnipresence of these multicolored containers is a testament to the efforts of the capitalist system to conceal them from us in normal times, before several renowned documentary photographers took up the subject in the 1980s (notably the photographer and conceptual artist Allan Sekula). On the other side of the light spectrum, the Milky Way, populated by planets and constellations that make us microscopic beings on the scale of the universe, but just as much terrestrial creatures as astral.
We are "stardust", to use the words democratized by Hubert Reeves, whose famous work, frequented by Abouzid Souali, established the idea of our indefectible link with the solar system as early as the 1980s. For as stars die, they release atoms into the space of which the earth and its inhabitants are made. Anchored in this cosmogonic thinking, which is taken a step further in this exhibition but has always existed in the artist's work, the athletes appear to us as much as realistic entities as chimeras drawn between the points of moving constellations. The consequent mythological (quasi-divine) dimension of these children, which links them to astral themes and cosmic forces, gives us a heroic view of them as figures in the conquest of space... while the afterglow of industrial landscapes and other ghostly post-petroleum infrastructures instills its share of ecological concerns, with regard to both men/women and the soil - not forgetting the relationships of economic and human exploitation.
Always caught in the crossfire or extremities of our fragmented (not to say atomized) existences, the athletic figures portrayed by Mariam Abouzid Souali evolve along a double road (according to a "double consciousness" to use Paul Gilroy's terms). They are guided as much by the liberating light of the stars (the reference to the African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, and the mythical image of their fist raised as a sign of the fight against racism) as by the "black hole" of climate disruption and other unfathomable skies. The shadow or black nebula that threatens to engulf the athlete's body also draws parallels with an important literary source for Mariam Abouzid Souali: George Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975). The novel's double plot (fictional and autobiographical) involves the creation of a utopian island where the inhabitants are subjected to increasingly dehumanizing and alienating feats and trials. Perec's art of rupture and ellipsis (as much a writer's work as an editor's) takes readers from utopia to dystopia almost without their realizing it.
In fact, Abouzid Souali's paintings are also constructed through cuts, leaps and ellipses, inviting us into multiple perspectives and points of view, but always shaped by a fundamental rift. The same spatio-temporal rift into which his athletes seem (consciously or unconsciously) ready to plunge.
Reminiscences of the Perecquian scenario in contemporary fiction can be found even in hit programs such as Squid Games - the South Korean survivalist series in which economically disadvantaged people are subjected to children's games in which they risk their lives - where horror and abjection are generally normalized by the "game" of fiction, or the interplay between pretence and reality. And while Abouzid Souali's pictorial works, which engage in considerable dialogue with literature, may well fall within the realm of contemporary fiction, they do not share its tendency to aestheticize horror and normalize violence.
For almost a decade, Mariam Abouzid Souali's paintings have been denouncing the inexorable acceleration of inequalities at the heart of the neoliberal capitalist system and its undoubtedly most dramatic consequence, the migratory crisis. This other black hole of our contemporary condition, plunged into an era of catastrophes that call us to resilience, solidarity and even "survivalist" strategies, Abouzid Souali's painting has, until today, provided striking pictorial evidence of this. In other words, capable of capturing the tragedy of history and honoring, with modesty, the first victims of the migratory drama; despite and through the unhealthy bombardment of media images of this tragedy that reach us every day. Saluting the memory of these souls resting without peace in the Mediterranean cemetery, which sadly continues to grow, also means challenging the myth of global citizenship, which remains largely utopian and scorned even before it exists.
Praised by the Third World and Communist utopias of the 1960s-1970s, cultivated by generations of poets, writers, painters and photographers, and finally recuperated and hijacked by neoliberal ideology, which has turned it into a paper dream with no future, humanist cosmopolitanism is under threat almost everywhere on the planet. As Abouzid Souali's paintings invite us to do, we need to make an objective and realistic assessment of the situation, without falling into the trap of outrageous catastrophism. It's also quite natural that this ethical virtue of painting to exorcise humanity's cursed side has evolved in the artist's work to include ecological issues (pollution, drought, uncontrolled urbanization...), reminding us that there is no longer any viable separation between the struggle for human rights and the struggle for the rights of the planet itself. Abouzid Souali's paintings loudly proclaim the suffering (but also the dignity) of the new damnés de la terre who face not only the cruelty of economic domination but also the "uprisings of the earth". In this respect, the artist belongs to a generation that could be described as eco-political.
This is the direction in which Mariam Abouzid Souali seems destined: in an impressive self-portrait entitled Equilibrium/Autofiction (2023), she shows herself in an island landscape (conducive to childhood memories), tiptoeing over rocks and carrying a balance, the universal symbol of justice. It's hard not to think of Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melancolia (1514), with the angel abandoning herself among the rocks and geometric instruments - which are not enough for her to measure the world. By subtly playing with the codes of Renaissance representation (between cosmic science, mathematics and mythology) and Romantic painting, Abouzid Souali moves away from melancholy and opts instead for drifting and balancing, making his own body an instrument of measurement and scale between the infinitely small and the infinitely large.
In the 1990s, as an epilogue to a 20th century riddled with humanitarian catastrophes, many renowned philosophers and thinkers tried to counter the inevitability of global imbalance and North-South inequalities; in other words, beyond economic fractures, to recreate a community of destinies, rediscover links and make borders more fluid. We're thinking in particular of Édouard Glissant's Traité du Tout-Monde (1997) (and its corollary of creolization), which rightly tried to surpass "chaos-world" through the poetics of Relation; a stance directly linked to Félix Guattari and his text Chaosmose (1992). But we're also thinking of Paul Gilroy and L'Atlantique noir: modernité et double conscience (1993), who revitalized the foundations of a borderless citizenship, against criteria of nationality or ethnicity, for the development and preservation of diasporic cultures; a mode of thought that is entirely adaptable to the Mediterranean, given the long-standing cultural exchanges that irrigate it.
Mariam Abouzid Souali's star-spangled paintings can be seen as a creative and poetic legacy of this philosophical alter-globalist era, but they also have a current value, active in the present, as a watchman or seismograph of the plates that clash from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other, and even beyond, through the utopian as well as dystopian odyssey of North-South relations.
Morad Montazami (director of Zamân Books & Curating)
