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Based in Berlin, winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2009, Saâdane Afif is what we might call a multidisciplinary artist, or rather an undisciplined, post-conceptual one, for the subject of his work is not so much musicality, which has nevertheless run like a red thread through his exhibitions, performances and texts since 2004, but rather the place accorded to aesthetic perception, to the gaze of the other. Appointed Artistic Director of Bergen Assembly 2022, the Bergen Triennial in Norway, he talks to curator Yasmine d'O. about his career, the genesis of the project and the seven-sided object whose quest temporarily ends on November 6.
John Cage once said: "One way to study music is to study Duchamp". Knowing your project The Fountain Archives (editor's note: based on Marcel Duchamp's work Fountain (1917)) and your interest, to say the least, your fascination or passion for Marcel Duchamp, did you come to musical creation through this tutelary figure?
Saâdane Afif : Not at all! Well... When people ask me about the relationship between my work and music, I start by pointing out that it's not music that interests me. I'm not a musician. I've always used sound as one material among others, but it was a particular focus on conceptual art in its relationship to language that led me to dismantle the song-making process. This happened through the text and, as is often the case, through the shaping of an intuition. In 2004, on the occasion of a small solo exhibition at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, I was invited to present some existing pieces. At the time, this was not very inspiring and a little frustrating, because as a young artist, I was mainly interested in trying out new things. Caught between a paltry budget and an uncooperative curator, I came up with a simple protocol to ensure that I would still be able to derive a rewarding experience from this uninspiring context. I asked the artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar, whose literary talent I knew, if she would write four song lyrics based on the four works I was presenting. Of course, I had no idea of the importance of this gesture in what was to follow. Since then, I've repeated the experience over two hundred times, and many of these texts have been published in the book Paroles. But at that precise moment, the idea was to produce a form of offbeat commentary, and above all to find a strategy for including other presences in the work space. I had to find a solution to the problem of the artist alone with his work.
Is it the collaborative aspect of music that interests you?
Again, I'm not a musician, but for a few years I was a very bad drummer in a band. A basic pop rock band, guitar, bass, drums. As with many amateur bands, everything happened during rehearsals. We didn't compose, nothing was preconceived, we didn't read the music and yet, as if by magic, something coherent sprang from this magma. A piece was constructed. Yes, this collaborative form of creation is intoxicating, and I may have sought to reintroduce a little of that experience into my work. But it's a reflection on art, not music, that has brought me back. The songs I commission only make sense because they are part of an art history. There's a filiation. They're born of a precise protocol. They allow me to aerate my work, to nourish it, to open it up to the imagination of others. Above all, they raise the question of the place of artworks in our society, and the way we look at them. To echo Duchamp, these song lyrics give form to what happens in the mind of the viewer when he or she makes the painting. This question of perception is a collective, collaborative exercise played out between the artist, his work and those who view it. I deliberately chose the song format, a popular format, partly because it's a poetic form, not an explanation, and partly because, for everyone, a song has a subject, so why not a work?
It's been said that your practice is rooted in music, in its components, its vocabulary, its nature - duration more than space, but also in its materiality, its instruments as plastic objects, as you've been able to arrange them in some of your installations. Is it the plastic and visual dimension of music, that is, the dimension that doesn't make up the nature of music, that interests you?
These song texts, which have in fact become material for my work, have also enabled me to go in unexpected directions. The question quickly became how to embody them and bring them to life. At first, the obvious thing to do was to entrust them to musicians. So, for the first time, I began to explore performative forms linked to musical creation. At first, I proposed exhibitions based on rehearsals, concert exhibitions, exhibitions showing all the stages in the production of a record, and finally, some time ago, I exhibited at Wiels, with visitors performing the songs themselves in a studio designed for the purpose. The production of a song, from the writing of the lyrics to the moment when they are articulated on stage or elsewhere in the mouth of a performer, is a chain of interpretation which, transposed into the field of visual arts, becomes a powerful tool of representation, an allegory. So to come back to your question, it's the conceptual process of creating music, the temporalities at work, the possible combinations of energies and its modes of transmission that interest me far more than its plastic and visual dimension, even if it does have its charms. I've even gone so far as to set up a label, Lyrics Records, which is both an archive for my projects and an object of exchange with the musicians. But I could paraphrase Magritte and say "this is not a record".
With this label, you're like a music producer. And the invitations you send out to artists have a very curatorial dimension... What about your curatorial role at the Bergen Triennale or Bergen Assembly 2022? How did you get here?
Bergen is a long story that began before Bergen. For the Marrakech Biennial, I conceived a performance that lacked the work-text-music system I've been talking about. I asked them to find a teacher who would be willing to give geometry lessons in Jemaa el-Fnaa square. Every evening, the teacher arrived with his flipboard, totally immersed in reality - in other words, there was no sign that his class was an art project. He would take his place among the acrobats who populate the place and begin "Today the triangle...!". And he too succeeded in creating a circle around him, a circle of people with very different levels of vision. There were, of course, informed visitors to the biennial; fascinated mountain dwellers who'd never attended a class; educated Moroccan tourists from the big cities, who were astonished and wondered why and how this professor had come to teach in the square. The Muslim Brotherhood also turned up, suspicious. In the Arab world, if you touch geometry, you touch God. In short, passers-by wondered what he was doing there, and at the same time they followed his geometry lesson as attentively as they followed his lecture. Geometry as a universal language is the ultimate ready-made. Geometry, the mother of all forms, stood in the middle of Jemaa el-Fnaa square, among the snake-watchers and fortune-tellers. I told myself that a new adventure was about to begin.
It's clear that your work is always divided into several episodes...
Exactly. To stay on topic, it's a bit like making a record: first one track, then two, then you put the whole thing together to make an album, then you go on tour, make video clips and so on. To extend the story of Marrakech, I wanted to recount in the form of fiction how this performance might have, could have or has transformed its surroundings through those who witnessed it. Once again, the questions that motivate me - which are also present in the text-song format or in the Archives de la Fontaine project - are our relationship to art. How does a given society produce art? To whom does this art belong? Is there such a thing as universal art? But how do we look at it? How do we include it? How does it transform the reality around us? How does art fit into our systems of thought? Because none of this is self-evident.
Is this where Yasmine d'O comes in?
Not yet, but she's coming soon! So, to follow up on this performance, I commissioned writer Thomas Clerc to write a play... I phrased the commission something like this: "One day in Marrakech, a professor came to give geometry lessons in the public space of Jemaa el-Fnaa Square. Some time after this event, unusual things happened: some of the typical characters in the square began to speak in Geometry. They developed an ornamental language. In the narrow streets of the medina, or on the terraces of the cafés lining the square, conversations of the highest abstraction could be heard. The text of this play will serve as the basis for the development of one or more future exhibitions.
In fact, did you give him a commission similar to the one you would give an author for a song text based on one of your works?
Exactly, in fact you could call it a method. Thomas agreed and we went to Marrakech, where I showed him the city and its typical characters. And that's when the first Yasmine appeared, but not yet Yasmine d'O. The original, let's say. The original, let's say. Together, we visited the Maison de la Photographie in Marrakech, and I came across a stunning image of an Arab woman playing French billiards in Paris. The photo was from the 1950s, obviously from the 1930s. There was a mistake on the cartel. I started researching and discovered Yasmine d'Ouezzan, the daughter of a notable woman from Valencienne and a Sherif from Ouezzan, whose life spanned the last century. She was said to be an adventuress, but rather a woman who sought her emancipation by many means, including billiards. Her lover was Vincent Scotto, lyricist to Tino Rossi and star Josephine Baker. I asked Thomas if he could add her to his list of characters, then waited. Once the order is placed and accepted, I have no idea what I'm going to receive, and I never interfere in the creative process. A few weeks later, I had the pleasure of reading L'Heptaèdre, in which Yasmine d'Ouezzan became the heroine, Yasmine. And so appears the second, fictional Yasmine. The plot is simple, a quest. Yasmine is in search of a shape, a seven-sided solid, a heptahedron. To find this shape, she meets seven characters: the Professor, the Huckster, the Moped Driver, the Fortune Teller, the Coalman, the Acrobats (who are two but one), and the Tourist. The play is in 49 acts, with fast-paced dialogue and a sense of the theater of the absurd. Without being an outline, it left plenty of room for the imagination. Thomas's response was perfect. I didn't want to stage the play, I wanted to use it as a support to develop something else. I had a basis.
Did you want to use it as a score?
Once a protocol is launched, it often becomes a score. You just have to be attentive to what it can produce. I had the text, the characters, this second fictional Yasmine. At the time, I didn't know Bergen Assembly. It was 2016-17. At the time, I was preparing my first exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, where I presented Thomas Clerc's text on a surtitler like those used in the theater for translation, line after line, and confronted the text and its heroine Yasmine (the fictional one) with the real life of Yasmine d'Ouezzan. The exhibition is on panels and features a collection of documents, press clippings, photos, notebooks and pressbooks: an austere format that you'd find in a documentation center or town hall. I then worked with Berlin-based designers Starstyling, whom I convinced to base their public collection on the play's seven characters. Starstyling's Solide Figure collection, inspired by the Heptahedron , now exists . These garments are not the costumes in the play; they exist in a completely different economy from my own. And yet each ensemble bears the name of a character. It's a first production whose actors are Starstyling's customers. There are a few hits in the collection, like this cap with Tourist on it, which you see quite a lot on the street. Then I was offered the position of convener - which I translated as artistic director - of Bergen Assembly 2022...
In 2011 or 2012, I met Solveig Øvstebø in Bergen, who had just published The Biennial Reader which was a kind of meta-biennale, an anthology of discourses on the constantly reinvented biennial format. You always get the impression that the curator of a biennial wants to reinvent the model, or is asked to reinvent the model. Perhaps an artist is in some ways more qualified than a curator. In 2022, it was interesting to follow in stereophony the work of two French artists curating a biennial: Kader Attia at the Berlin Biennial and you in Bergen. What was your approach as an artist?
That's probably why I was chosen. Now I had to formulate a project, and I was given six months to develop it. At the same time, I was working on Thomas' piece. You always have things right under your nose. Bergen Assembly is the idea of putting things together. I had this piece which tells the story of someone who is looking for a form - an artist is looking for a form, a curator is looking for a form -. She meets seven characters who in the end come together to become this form. Everything was said. Initially, I wanted to create an odyssey of solo exhibitions based on this text, and why not do it in Bergen as part of a triennial, inviting other artists? So I decided to use the piece to build the Bergen Assembly curatorial project. This idea, born in Marrakech, was beginning to migrate slowly to northern Europe. Shared, it would hybridize and grow in contact with other contexts.
Funnily enough, it's the opposite journey of Peer Gynt, the eponymous character from Ibsen's play set to music by Bergen-born composer Edvard Grieg, whose odyssey takes him from Norway to the Moroccan desert.
Indeed, we could have crossed paths along the way... And it was along the way that I invited a third Yasmine, Yasmine d'O., the curator of the exhibition. This homonymy is a coincidence. It was with her that we established the principles of the exhibition. There would be seven exhibitions, each dedicated to the seven characters of L'Heptaèdre, presented in seven locations around the city. Each exhibition would feature the work of three artists. To follow theatrical vocabulary, Bergen is the stage, the exhibitions are the characters, the works of the invited artists are the actors who bring the characters to life, and the main, most important role - that of Yasmine's character - is assigned to the public, who are invited to re-enact her quest. And what remains in the visitor's mind is the Heptahedron, what he will have constructed from his perception of the whole.
Without getting too psychological, does this semi-fictional character allow you to take on something that isn't you? Is it a way of veiling yourself? Or is it just a superfiction ? Or is it a literary and artistic pretext that's a little more inspiring than a traditional curatorial statement?
I'd say all at once. Yasmine d'O. is a semi-fictional person, or a semi-real character... Without her, without her intimate relationship with this story, with this quest, nothing could have happened. We even tried to have two salaries...
It's clever... to turn fiction into reality. Unfortunately, it was all fiction.
Yasmine d'O. would have been happy with a semi-real salary... but that wasn't possible. And yet it was the work of two people that was carried out over three years.
Not to mention that she is also editor-in-chief of Side Magazine, the publication dedicated to the characters.
In The Coalman section, we find the presence of Claude Debussy. My question is, how does this presence manifest itself? How do you display the music? It's interesting to have your point of view on this question. Seeing images of this part of the exhibition, I think in retrospect of the panel exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Vienna you mentioned, the kind of ecomuseum documentary exhibition.
Even before I was invited by Bergen Assembly, I started developing ideas around Le Charbonnier for an exhibition that never took place. What is coal? It's a very ambiguous thing, which brings us back to progress and comfort, and at the same time to the history of mining, colonization and the hardest workers' struggles, and then to the disastrous ecological situation we're in now. Coal is a drug as addictive as heroin. In Germany, 50% of lighting is still coal-fired. What could we do without light? We can't do without it yet. I wanted to talk about this complex issue, not from the militant angle of political ecology, but in a poetic way. I discovered this piece by Debussy, Les Soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon, his very last piece for solo piano, whose title is taken from Baudelaire's poem Le Balcon . Debussy wrote this piece in 1917, and died in 1918. He was poor and very ill, and at the height of the war, coal supplies were very difficult... as they are today. His impresario had given him the contact of a coal merchant, who asked him for an autograph, an original signed score, in exchange for his fuel. Debussy therefore composed his very last piece for this coal merchant in exchange for his merchandise. In fact, there is a correspondence between the two men. The story is a beautiful one, and says a lot about our addiction to fossil fuels and comfort. Debussy's piece is also very beautiful, full of twilight melancholy. The exhibition documents this story, and a piano is available in the hall. Piano teachers have been invited to rehearse the piece with their students.
Have the associated events (concerts, performances or talks) been completed at Bergen Assembly to date?
We're in the process of organizing the last two weeks, culminating in the weekend of November 5-6. It's still a bit improvised, but you'll have to check the program online. One of the venues for the triennial is a small club. In Bergen everything is smaller in scale, but everything is up to international standards. In The Fortune Teller section, one of the three guest artists is Jessika Khazrik, a Lebanese artist who studied ecotoxicology at MIT. She is also a producer of electronic music and creates artworks. She was entrusted with this club to become its soul as a fortune-teller. There have already been two nights and two evenings on October 21 and 22.
Bergen is also home to the composer Edvard Griegwhose house and composition hut can be visited. On the outskirts of Oslo, the Heni Onstad Kunstsenterincorporated into an extensive environment, enjoys a prestige similar to that of Black Mountain College, with a collection of Fluxus works and historical links with John Cage. And in Norway, black metal is also deeply rooted. Did you base the program on local dynamics?
Yasmine et les sept faces de l'Heptaèdre (Yasmine and the Seven Sides of the Heptahedron ) is an off-ground story that landed like a spaceship on the city of Bergen. But we took particular care to ensure that certain works and performances by the guest artists were in keeping with, or interacted with, local structures. Of the 21 projects presented, a dozen have this function, and of these, three are musical performances. Composer Augustin Maurs has produced Nothing More, a piece for choir and organ, and an installation in The Coalman section, using voice extraction as a source of sonic and political resilience. The second musical project is by Jessika Khazrik as part of the aforementioned The Fortune Teller . And in The Tourist section, the third musical moment is a concert by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's group Exotourisme, formed with Perez, which took place on the evening of the opening in connection with the presentation of the whole Exotourisme experience: an original room plugged into the historical environment, presented in 2002 at the Centre Pompidou on the occasion of the Marcel Duchamp prize.
But it's important not to explain too much, to leave the works in all their wildness, not to try to tame them. Above all, they're meant for the eye. It's up to the viewer to bring them into existence. A work of art that is not looked at does not exist, or at the very least remains mute. That's why the lead role, that of Yasmine, was given to the public.
Interview by Tristan Bera
