Randa Maroufi
Le Park - Film - 14min - 2015
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 17
A place with nebulous frontiers and laws. Characters captured in an existence whose outlines flee the camera’s gaze. Such is the world of the old fairground located in the Arab League Park in Casablanca that Randa Maroufi leads us into.
Actions frozen in gestures of exchange, expectation and aggression are played out following a score conducted by the artist who, in the manner of Eric Baudelaire, uses composition to explore reality. But this reality is also virtual, for these scenes come in part from a repertoire of violent self-representations found on the Internet. The artist reprises their vocabulary. Violence, she tells us, is a language, and its interpretation is a matter of context.
A strange vitality emanates from the gentle immobility of the silent travelling shot that drifts through the scenes acted out by the local inhabitants, whether simply passing through or precarious residents. Like the roughness of the vegetal and urban architecture of the abandoned park, these existences are not festive, yet they celebrate life’s endurance, a vital energy that is hidden yet tenacious. Maroufi’s Le Park escapes along each hidden path, leading us on in a gentle dream whose outcome is never revealed to us. Indifferent to our presence, it murmurs its silent rhythm.
These scenes, these lives – the artist began by approaching them with restraint, then trust, and always with respect. Without ever seeking to appropriate the indomitable park or the existences that inhabit it, Maroufi leads us into an intimate world on the threshold of an intensity at once real and fantasised. The artist thus draws, incisively yet delicately as if with a metal tip, a forgotten tale at the heart of the city but on the margins of the world.
Inès Bouaillon
Randa Maroufi
Born in 1987 in Casablanca. She currently lives and works in Paris.
Randa Maroufi is a graduate of the National Institute of Fine Arts, Tetouan, Morocco (2010) and the School of Fine Arts, Angers, France (2013). She also earned a diploma from Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Tourcoing, France (2015). Randa Maroufi has been Artist Member of Academy of France in Madrid at Casa de Velázquez in 2017 – 2018.
Belonging to the generation that grew up in an era dominated by image, she collects them with as much eagerness as suspicion, and ceaselessly questions their veracity. She prefers to put her ambiguous fictions in the service of reality, and the field of her experimentation encompasses the occupation of public space and gender issues, of which she highlights the founding mechanisms.
The experimental works of filmmaker and artist Randa Maroufi explore an elastic awareness of reality. Her films and moving images often employ special effects and other formal devices that alter perceptions of time, space and movement.
Her recent group exhibitions include: Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2019); MA Museum, Quebec (2019); Biennale de Dakar, Senegal (2018); Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2018); Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, Belgium (2018), Sharjah Biennial, Lebanon (2017); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2017); KAI 10 | Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany (2017); Videonale e. V., Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2017); New Directors / New Films at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016); International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2016); African Photography Meeting, Bamako, Mali (2015); the Marrakech Biennale, Morocco (2014), etc.
She has received many awards for her film Le Park (2015), and Bab Sebta (2019).
