Tempus Fugit Produced by MAFODER Group
Curated by M’hammed Kilito, Artistic Director Meriem Berrada, Exhibition Designer Zineb Andress Arraki, and MAFODER Group CEO Ibrahim Slaoui
Fatima Zohra Serri, Time (2020) fine art print, 90 x 60 cm. Courtesy of Fatima Zohra Serri.
A state of health emergency had been declared in the kingdom, imposing a mandatory confinement and a restriction of our movements applied, modifying our relationship to time. Very quickly, it seemed to escape us. Days, weekends, weeks... All passed, in the immutable decor of our interiors. A feeling of absurdity in this confinement reminds us of Groundhog Day, a film in which the hero perpetually relives the same day.
Another reference, tragic this time. The Myth of Sisyphus is also summoned. Camus’s hero, who strives to push a rock up a mountain, is rendered impotent in the face of its fall, and finds himself in a state of eternal restart. Although overwhelmed by this senseless task, Sisyphus is presented as a fighter, a being aware of the absurdity of his condition, as if the unintelligibility of his world would eventually free him! He chooses life against all odds and Camus goes so far as to "imagine Sisyphus happy."
Thus, despite the absurdity of the situation experienced, should we take a less pessimistic stance on the constraints imposed by the confinement? What was played out during this common experience? To answer these questions, eight Moroccan photographers have documented, alone and within their communities, this historical confinement and the strange period that followed: a post-confinement with relative freedom. A gradual return to "the life before" in a world in unending change.
Between stagings, graphic games, reports, and experiments, our eight witnesses photographed the spaces around them, documenting and delivering engaged, intimate, and poetic glances. Through a subtle visual narrative, their images offer precious testimonies and leave a sensitive imprint of this unedited part of our shared history.
Between photojournalism, graphic interplay, stagings, and artistic and poetic experimentations, Tempus Fugit intersects and interweaves moments of life, like contemporary archives that reveal the diverse facets of today’s Morocco. This led to the creation of a diverse photographic corpus of over fifty prints, each a representation of everyday life as time stood still.
Here is a mosaic of personal viewpoints and individual stories that enter into dialogue and respond to one another in a resolutely minimalistic scenography that is designed by Zineb Andress Arraki to reconstitute a thorough cartography of this atypical moment in time.
Yassine Toumi, Untitled (2020) fine art print, 40 x 60 cm. Courtesy of Yassine Toumi.