Mise en Place. Nordine Sajot

The showroom of the SUBSTRATUM architecture studio, a small jewel opening onto the street in Rome’s Monti district, hosts the works of Nordine Sajot, an artist who, in the most diverse forms, such as video, sculpture and drawing, embodies all her anthropological interest.

“Mise en Place” is the fourth four-monthly project between contemporary art and design conceived by the founders of the studio, Giorgia Castellani and Giovanni Tamburro, in collaboration with Amalia Di Lanno, communicator and art consultant. In the gallery space, the installation design recreates every time a different a room of the house that enters into dialogue with the invited artists, through their work and the series of events organised through the exhibition conceived as a relational and sharing process.

This time the protagonist is the kitchen, a space of aggregation par excellence, a theatre of gestures and rituals that have been at the centre of many of Sajot’s works and are therefore well suited to this synergy. Gestuality of the table as a distinctive factor of status, a mirror of sociality that today takes shape in the accelerated rituality of information ingested, swallowed, never metabolised.

Anthropological interest is brought into focus through the adoption of different forms but also different creative approaches that subtend a very profound work on perception. The subtraction of certain details from a series of photographs depicting gestures typical of the table (i.e. arms holding cutlery or glasses) does not detract from, but rather reinforces, that same gestuality. The re-materialisation of these parts in ex-voto sculptures set up on the wall brings them back to life to construct a dialogue in their own right.

Thus with this elegant and minimalist interior architecture space, Nordine Sajot’s works, photographs, ceramic and glazed porcelain sculptures, leave traces of man and his sociality in all their vitality.

The search for materials is central to the design. In fact, the showroom layout revolves around the GOLD model by Situazione Architettura, a central black monolith clad in black Fenix Ingo, a particularly innovative material that is opaque, soft to the touch and anti-fingerprint.

The material, such as the durable glass created by Duralex, portrayed in a series of photographs with a subtle play of solids and voids, also has a prominent place in the artist’s work. This material invented in France in 1945 is associated with tableware and cutlery designs that are part of the collective memory, particularly popular in school canteens.

The relationship of form and function at the basis of design in Sajot’s work is as if reversed in time, projected into the past rather than the future, in a work of reconstruction, from gesture to ritual and from ritual to social status. The painting reconstitutes itself around the design in its moment of stasis, before entering the social vitality of the homes.

“The artist”, as we read in the press release, “composes a tableau vivant that activates different appetites to enter, reflect and metabolise the sensitive depth of the gestural body. The artist’s is a ritual and performative practice of existential awareness of one’s presence, of acquiring ‘flavour’ and knowing what one is and wants”.