http://www.arthurzerktouni.net
In Memoriam, installation (interactive video projection on a screen of water), 2012.
A production of Le Fresnoy-Studio national
There are fugitive memories which, if one is not careful to capture their vague silhouette just as they emerge, fade and disappear for ever.
There are, on the other hand, memories that one tries to blot out and which remain indelible. To what intimate abyss, to what sometimes irremediably closed and nevertheless porous place do these images belong? Where do our buried memories go, from where do those we had thought forgotten reappear?
Oblivion, as the total antithesis of memory, is necessary and forms the negative, mysterious, paradoxical aspect of it. Memory and oblivion as ambiguous dual realities, borderline and brief, seem to rule intermediate times. From the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes lost in the contemplation of three drops of blood on the snow who, completely engrossed, forgets what is around him, to the Borges of The Other who wants to forget meeting with his past double so as not to lose his mind, memory and oblivion puts a time into play where borders are momentarily effaced. And where there are no borders, there are no words to designate the imperceptible. However, this in-between of waking and sleeping, of present and past, of world and self, which was given the pretty term dorveille or semi-sleep, in the Middle Ages, is perhaps ours still and more often that one thinks - in the carrying out of mechanical gestures, in waiting, daydreaming, boredom and habit.
Where there are no words representation remains. Staging the moment that precedes the disappearance of a memory, In memoriam offers itself as a metaphor of this in-between in which one goes from memory to oblivion. If art, even though it cannot be reduced to simply that, is also a trace, playing on the scale of collective memory the role of personal memory, In memoriam is not a trace.
By inviting the spectator to a collective dorveille, In memoriam makes itself the trace – and its disappearance.
Chloé Chalumeau, Doctoral fellow in Medieval literature (Paris-Sorbonne University)
Arthur Zerktouni was born in 1983 in Casablanca and now resides and works in Tours. Arthur graduated from the ENSA of Bourges in 2010 and afterwards from the Studio national du Fresnoy in 2012. Arthur’s installations are composed around space and time with the use of light-flow and water-flow in a aesthetic manner. He uses different materials such as fluorescent wires, as in his series of installations, Compositions, shown at the Fine Art Museum of Tours (Limonaia 2012) and also during the Efest of Tunis (Objet Son 2012), however, it is predominantly water that is at the heart of his work. His first experiments with water were his sound installation Danae (Panorama 13 Le Fresnoy) and In Memoriam, his final project at Le Fresnoy. Arthur defines In Memoriam as "a monument in memory of oblivion". Arthur Zerktouni’s creations are characterized by their subtility and their finesse that portray an intangible and elusive universe.
