I REMEMBER 2009-2012Single-channel video installation 2 min 50 sec, color, sound It is a short video which was extracted from a long interview with Larbi Yacoubi which was filmed in 2009. He was an actor and a wardrobe master. He was close to writers such as Jane and Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Mohamed Choukri during the 60s.Interviewed about this emblematic era in the history of Tangier, Yacoubi is unable to remember anything about it. The video has only recorded moments of silence and images of a man without memories.
"A particular work - where the interviewee cannot remember what he should say - suggested the inception of a new strand in the artist's research. 'Forgetting one's lines' would in principle be a serious liability for a practice predicated on what is said and what is lost between interlocutors. But this particular video carried, in elliptical but eloquent fashion, a striking explanation for silence, for the inability to formulate memories: there is too much to remember, too many memories vie for expression at the same time, and surplus replaces erasure. I believe this could be key to profiling the practice more sharply against a sum of like-minded discourses in the art world. The distant voice is posited not as loss, curtailed echo, or dispossession. The distant voice was a carrier of a surplus, of a soft-spoken overabundance. In Halloubi's practice, this might indicate a transition from 'those who are not allowed to speak' to 'those who have too much to say' - so much so, that we might be unprepared to listen." Mihnea Mircan