Delphine Valli’s notes and reflections on the important confrontation between Western and Eastern visual culture continues today as a veritable diary from Marrakech where her residency The Impossible Present, the winning project of the 10th Italian Council edition, is underway at Le 18 Derb el Ferrane. Her seeing and feeling is positioned at the centre of these two cultures, cultural boundaries that embrace the artist’s life in different stages (she lived in Algiers from 3 months to 16 years and Rome, where she currently lives and works). Her creative research, which has always been committed to exploring the tensions created between artistic intervention and space, rediscovers the traditional Islamic matrix from which it originates. We entered into the process of this journey in order to catch his reflections in the heat of the moment and as they formed. The dialogue began with a very spontaneous and informal conversation in July 2022, starting to reflect on this complex relationship between cultures by referring to Hans Belting’s Canons of the Gaze (Arshake, 15.07.2022). At that time the journey was still to come. Now the experience is ongoing and the thought in these months has taken conscious form, it is in the midst of its journey and we will let you follow it in one breath as it happened when I opened the mailbox on 8 October 2022, and this is just the antechamber of a story that will continue next week.
Elena Giulia Rossi
I arrived in the Marrakech Medina on 14 August, around midnight
The main thoroughfare was full of people, the shops were open
I felt as if I was dreaming and that all this was not real
The next day, it was the intensity of the dry scorching heat on my skin
the noises, the faces, the sounds of language, from the depths of my being to resurface a memory buried until then
slumbering because it had not been awoken
A tension was easing in which I realised I had been living since my return to France
That day, I photographed the boundary wall of Marrakech, at Bab Doukkala, one of the Medina gates
I was struck by the inscription Unico Grand Amour, and there was another one, in Arabic, cryptic for me at the time
(now I know it means Astro della paura – of that which inspires fear – or Planet of horror and could be related to a football team)
my first mural project already existed and combined Italian, French and Arabic!
A strong smell of urine at the foot of the wall overwhelmed me
the Unico Grand Amour contained and embraced everything, the verticality and the piss
humanity, such and such
Who refuses nothing, to enter
All this under the scorching, hallucinating heat of mid-August
Juan Palao [philologist, librarian, translator, teacher and independent art critic, living in Marrakech since 2011] reminded me that Yves Saint Laurent, unable to return to Algiers, settled in Marrakech
as well as Eric Van Hove, an artist I have yet to meet, born in Algiers and settled in Marrakech
It is strange, this impossible return to Algiers leading here, to Marrakech, at the gates of the desert
While talking to Aniko M.E Boehler [anthropologist, producer, filmmaker, curator, environmentalist, creative and social entrepreneur] about the invisible data in my work, which I consider as being equal to the visible, she suggested that I discover the Gnawa, a mystical brotherhood present in Morocco, and its intangible heritage, and that I should talk to Philippe Lauro Baranès [with KamarStudios_Morocco, Khalid Içame, Ouled Kamar Ensemble, Maâlem Abbès Larfaoui Baska] about it
Through him, who was generous enough to share the fruit of years of research with me, I delved a little into this enigmatic universe
For the Gnawa, exile is exile from the Self
they are witness to the loss of a world
for them, the world of daytime reality is a world understood as already dead, like starlight
Through their rituals, a night-time of trance represents abolition, the metamorphosis of time into space
the re-appropriation of one’s own time and space
The question of return necessarily involves that of exile
of uprooting
Melania Rossi rightly understood the various facets of my relationship to return
as well as that to the culture in which I grew up highlighting the likely close connection that my artistic practice could have with it
The desire to return to Algiers was motivated by the need to finally make time and space coincide
Now that I more consciously perceive the beauty of Islamic art and better understand what I previously discerned only intuitively, I realise that the issue of return is deeper than I imagined
in no way limited to a culture or geographical territory
whereas exile is of a different nature
and perhaps I have the opportunity, through my own return, to be able to assess its nature
As if geography and what it implies were just a path to follow towards the Self
The way and not the destination
Orientation, literally
Regarding the wall projects I set out to create for The Impossible Present as a visual trace of my journey here, it immediately seemed unthinkable to paint walls, impossible or out of place to permanently mark them.
It is light, shadow, the real protagonists in Marrakech, echoing my studies on Islamic visual culture and its relationship with the theory of vision, as well as the city itself, that have imposed themselves and the walls
Then there is the transitory, the ephemeral, because these reflect an awareness of the elusive
and, perhaps, a reluctance for the imagined image to be necessarily permanent
with the associated dominance over the already existing
“Space is impenetrable, it is the miracle.” (M. C. Escher)
(Leonardo Caffo, Velocità di fuga, “Escape Velocity”)
It is hard to imagine then, in a country where there was once a French protectorate, the desire to dominate over the existing
And the verticality, already brought about by the verticality of the wall
I also thought of ash, which I have already worked with this year, I will return to it, which is trace, and which, in the following project, is associated with shadow, it is its translation
These are the spaces I have frequented since childhood and the reason why I returned to the study and observation of this traditional art
Studying it and understanding it better, always to a limited extent for me, helped me to shed light on aspects that I could only guess at and allowed me to begin to move away from a vague relationship to the potential of artistic language
“By excluding every image that could invite man to fix his mind on something outside himself and to project his soul in an “individualizing” form, aniconism creates a void. In this respect the function of Islamic art is analogous to that of virgin nature, of the desert especially, which likewise favors contemplation”
“Ornamentation with abstract forms enhances it through its unbroken rhythm and its endless interweaving. Instead of ensnaring the mind and leading it into some imaginary world, it dissolves mental “fixations”, just as contemplation of a running stream, a flame, or leaves quivering in the wind, can detach consciousness from its inward “idols”.” (Art of Islam, Language and Meaning, Titus Burckhardt)
These aspects, whether formal or conceptual, also pervade a certain type of mystical practice in contemporary art here, which builds on them, reshaping and integrating them with others.
…. to be continued…
Delphine Valli, Marrakech, October 6, 2022
images: (cover 1) Delphine Valli, «Unico Grand Amour», Palazzo del Badii, L’Incomparabile, Marrakech, 2022 (2 3) Delphine Valli,Project for wall drawing, shadow, light, removable material element, Projet pour dessin mural, ombre, lumière, élément matériel amovible, Marrakech, 2022
Delphine Valli, The Impossible Present, Le 18 Derb el Ferrane, Marrakech, Marocco
Curatorial support: Melania Rossi | Cultural Partners. Marseille: Mucem, Department of Research, Opera Mundi, FAI-AR at Cité des arts de la rue, Les Ecrans du Large at La Friche Belle de Mai; Rome: AlbumArte | Cultural sponsor: Parallelo42 Contemporary Art
Project supported by the Italian Council (10th edition, 2021), program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture
