Saïd Afifi
Etymology - Film - 16min - 2017
presented as part of the exhibition panorama 19
“Today, we have invented an accidental time – that is an instant, which partakes neither of the past, nor of the future, and which is fundamentally uninhabitable.”
Paul Virilio
Two worlds coexist in embryo. Contemporary ruins superimposed over ancestral ones evolve together, marrying past, present, and future.
This film is an invitation to archaeological introspection, in a world in suspension where man is nothing more than a memory. It invites us to contemplate the development of the flesh and the birth of an imaginary alchemical and mineral universe.
If the word ETYMOLOGY means literally the origin of a word and its historical, cultural, and metaphorical progression, it becomes here a kind of interval that links a multitude of layers, between ancient architecture and ultramodern structures, between dance and death, between stone and life, motion and inertia.
The real and the hyperreal. ETYMOLOGY also becomes an eternal dialogue between forms, in which meaning no longer exists, no more than the narrator (author). Just a few sounds engraved on rocks subsist, functioning like records, exactly like the black boxes that become so fascinating after a plane crash.
Accelerating progress in the contemporary world implies that tomorrow’s surveys will be of ruins; a kind of archaeology of the future.
Saïd Afifi
Born in 1983 in Morocco Lives and works in Paris Graduated from the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan, Morocco, in 2008, and from the Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, in 2018
Exploring the potential and status of the digital image, Saïd Afifi is interested in the blurred boundaries between real and virtual spaces. In Yemaya ("the mother whose children are like fish"), named after an Afro-Caribbean goddess of the oceans, which he began in 2018, the artist teamed up with the CNRS to create a photogrammetry of an underwater cave, recreating a three-dimensional vision of the place thanks to the multiplication of the points of view captured, rendered by a device in virtual reality.
Exhibitions: 2022 Les Constellations de la terre, L'Atelier 21, Casablanca, Morocco (solo); Inspiré.e.s. Acte 2: Arts numériques, L'arTsenal, Dreux ; Rencontres de Bamako, Bamako, Mali 2021 État d'urgence d'instants poétiques, Jardin d'essai botanique, Rabat, Morocco; Paradis artificiels, Galerie Bacqueville, Lille 2019 Loop Barcelona, Museu d'Història de Catalunya, Barcelona; Festival Ambiance / Le devenir-monde, cinéma Les Colonnes, Blanquefort; Vice versa 5.0. Creative Crossborder Meeting, Mundaneum, Mons, Belgium 2018 (Re) Model the World, Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai
