Can I tell you? In dialogue with Nordine Sajot

Nordine Sajot’s exhibition Can I tell you?, curated by Michela Becchis at the AAIE Centre for Contemporary Art in Rome, came to a close whilst leaving many of the questions raised throughout the exhibition open. The exhibition retraced over twenty years of the artist’s practice through installations, photographs, sculptures and site-specific works that explore consumerism, Western collective memory and the systems of power embedded in food culture.

From her early work to her most recent pieces, Sajot’s work addresses the relationship between desire, consumption and individual responsibility, examining these phenomena through a lens that weaves together anthropology, history and material culture. Throughout the exhibition, which navigated the spectrum between the intimate and the social, and between the analogue and the digital, historical works and new pieces engaged in dialogue, including I WAS HERE, HABEMUS, EX-VOTO Against War, Le Maniglie dell’Amore, LOGIN, L’Ordine delle cose and I WAS HERE Supermarket, the latter created with the aid of artificial intelligence.

Now that the exhibition has concluded, Nordine Sajot retraces the main threads of his research, reflects on the significance of this project and explores the issues that continue to make it particularly relevant today.

Laura Catini: As Michela Becchis invites us to interpret, the title Consumare corresponds to various levels of interpretation, based on its derivation from the two Latin verbs, consumere and consummare.

They literally translate as the antithesis of ‘taking entirely’ and, the second, ‘bringing to a definitive conclusion’ – two actions that appear irreconcilable in the life of the Great Consumer. Indeed, it seems that these two moments create a parallel in your research, in the relationship between excess and essentiality…

Nordine Sajot: Indeed, the current excess of this globalised consumption stands in contrast to a consummated essentiality arising from our relationship with the world and the environment, both of which are severely compromised. Encouraging being rather than having is a theme that increasingly evokes a detoxification from deeply consumerist habits and socio-cultural dynamics. These issues were reflected in the exhibition in a dualistic manner, between presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, negative and positive, light and shadow. Between the anthropological aspect of human evolution and what consumerist dynamics have generated and continue to generate – such as conflicts at a global level, alongside the historical implications that unfold within them.

The relationship between commodities and individualism, as framed within the system of ‘hypermarkets’, opens up the narratives presented in the exhibition, which seem to unfold as if in a vast pop-up, as Michela Becchis explains in her critical essay. From tableware, through rituals and gestures, to wallpaper resembling advertising hoardings, a contemporary mythology takes shape that echoes the questions we pose regarding human evolution…

Let’s say that I have always sought to link visual research to a deeper exploration of philosophy, sociology and anthropology, but also physiology, neuropsychiatry and psychology, which enable me to understand various facets related to human evolution. In the creation of groups and survival strategies, the organisation of systems of dominance, and how mechanisms of dogma emerge in various forms with toxic superstructures, as they seek to dictate powers of control. It goes without saying that issues of identity or gender also have their place within these mechanisms of dominance and power. However, I believe that, beyond this, our era puts everything at risk by generating terrifying contemporary mythological epics through an over-representation and dramatisation of ourselves via today’s media. Hence also the reference to the figure of the goddess Diana with the EX-VOTOs made from organic material, which allude to our compromised relationship with nature and the primordial feminine.

“Shiny and reflective, made of dry leaves and thick paper, these ex-voto pieces mark the end of a journey that does not seek to represent entire lives, but rather events that burst into lives so violently as to shatter time, leaving no room for an appeal to the divine. …” – says Michela Becchis. How did this series of ex-votos, conceived by you, come about? How do they relate to the mechanism of collective memory?

This formal system I have created arose, amongst other things, from my study of the writings of anthropologists such as André Leroi-Gourhan, who established that human beings owe their survival to the ingenuity they have invested in the use and refinement of their upper and lower limbs. These are fundamental to the procurement and preparation of food. Consuming certain foods has also enabled the body to evolve in a specific direction, allowing the brain, in turn, to evolve in a specific direction as well. Enhanced fine motor and neurological skills have accelerated these processes, leading also to dietary choices – such as the adoption of agriculture and animal husbandry – that fostered a sedentary lifestyle and the development of economies, as well as models and structures of thought, including in our relationship with the universe. Let’s say, then, that the social aspect – the rituality and gestures associated with meals – becomes a narrative form stemming from these concepts that resonate with our collective memory. This applies both to body language and to its representation in the composition of signs and forms. When I arrived in Italy, I was struck by the significance of the Catholic faith within the cultural fabric. My attention turned to ex-votos, which, throughout history, have spanned the millennia whilst retaining a pagan-religious ambivalence. The forms I create in the silhouettes of my sculptures are referred to as, and take the form of, ex-votos, precisely for this reason; yet whatever form my work takes, there is always a study and a careful choice behind it that is by no means random. Furthermore, utilising and shaping one’s own sensibility in our work as artists involves engaging with the structure of the languages we use in connection with a dimension that extends beyond ourselves; otherwise, we would be mere creatives and not, in fact, artists. Both perceiving and investigating what resonates with the collective memory form part of the synthesis of these elements.

An extract from Michela Becchis’s critical essay is also striking: ‘The more one consumes, the more one produces an endless residue; consumption becomes a pathology of the system that eliminates something often indispensable and adds a residue that is all the more harmful the harder it is to eliminate. Within the vast accumulation of edible goods into which Nordine leads us by putting his own body on the line, the paradox—etymological as well—of consumption that grows out of all proportion and produces constant superfetation, a superfluous and harmful addition, a pleonasm of reason, is realised. The artist makes visible what Sayak Valencia writes in Capitalismo Gore: ‘A contradictory and systematically out-of-control dimension of the neoliberal project. The hyper-consumerist identity and its counterpart: the ever-shrinking population with sufficient purchasing power to satisfy the desire for consumption’ …

I am extremely grateful for this beautiful text by Michela Becchis, written following careful discussions and in-depth analysis. Her professionalism and sensitivity, through her hand, become as revelatory as in analogue photography, bringing to the surface the image imprinted on the sensitive medium of paper, and bringing to light what it has etched deep within.