Then do they not look at the camels – how they are created?
And at the sky – how it is raised?
And at the mountains – how they are erected?
And at the earth – how it is spread out?
Quran, Surat Al-Ghashiyah , verses 17 to 20
Abdelkader Damani studied architecture in Oran, Algeria. Upon his arrival in France in 1993, he studied art history and philosophy at the universities of Lyon 2 and Lyon 3. After having overseen the art and architecture programs at the Centre Culturel de Rencontre de la Tourette (Le Corbusier's architecture), he directed, from 2007 to 2015, the VEDUTA platform at the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art. In 2014, he was co-curator of the Dakar Biennial (Our Common Future, Dak'Art 2014) and the Contemporary Art Festival in Oujda (do not be apart from the world, Oujda 2014). From 2015 to 2023 he was Director of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire, where in 2017 he created the first Orléans Architecture Biennial (Walking through someone ele Dream of Another, Orléans 2017). In 2019, he is the general curator of the first Rabat Biennial (An instant before the world, Rabat 2019) and directed the second edition of the Orléans Architecture Biennial (Years of solitudes, Orléans 2019) as well as the third edition in 2022 (Infinite liberty, a world for a feminist democracy).
In 2023, he is appointed Director of the Irqah Creative Art Laboratory in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
About
The Earth as the only museum
Climate change reveals the fragility of the world, so we dream of a future world safe to protect us from the risks that threaten us. We even fantasize about leaving the earth to inhabit other planets. But we have only the earth as our dwelling, and we have inhabited it for millennia without damaging it. We must therefore make the effort to remember the times when we lived in the company of animals, close to plants, close to the oceans. The heat, the cold, the wind, the rain were our allies.
In today's age, to say "I dream, therefore I am" seems to be freedom-constraining. We live in a world of permanent illusion, one that is dominated by screens. G.A.F.A., seems to have replaced the God whose death was once announced in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The new deities create a conformist copy of the world, a facsimile of ourselves and the constructed world we inhabit. Reality is reproduced endlessly in the flow of communications and social networks and may no longer be necessary.
Being aware of this illusion forces us to find other life strategies, a new way of countering facial recognition, geolocation and all the other modes of tracking that haunt us. Are we still able to escape what is predictable? Are there still strangers to meet? And what if, as Luciano Canfora suggests, "Reality itself, the visible one, is a deforming copy of the real world, the world of ideas"? How then can we find our way back to the real world of ideas?
This is what exhibitions and museums must take care off. Even if an exhibition is never completed. In fact, making an exhibition is the realization of an unfinished.
The art exhibition is an artisanal affair that proceeds from the meadow and the post and a chain of risk-taking, especially in the case of a Biennale. Prepare, review again, make and undo, arrange and deconstruct... convince artists, reassure them, love them, and remain faithful to them. And to choose them to remember them. Choosing artists is a matter of remembrance.
Exhibiting works is the act of unfolding a fold, untying a knot to create new ones. Redrawing the territory for an idea or inventing a territory for an idea that does not have one: the holy grail of curatorial activity.
Reading the Qur'an occurs to us to conclude that we are obliged to look at the world, to meditate on it at every moment. And make it the one and only museum.
The whole world as a single museum. It is this quest that drives the paths that I have been travelling, often despite myself, for decades. Because what is a museum if not a floating territory above ground. A place to get out of the illusion of the constructed world and meet the world of ideas. But that hope ended up becoming a new illusion. By enclosing the works too much within four walls, and by assigning them to respect boundaries, we have made our museums reproducing our Colonial Thoughts.
It is strange, for example, to see the prohibition made on a work of ancient Egypt to leave its world to go and meet an Italian painting. And to see the solitude of the works, said to be of a primitive art, experience the sadness of exile and the insult of the exotic. Instead of being a place of freedom, the museum teaches respect for borders and the sacredness of origins. Far be it from me to deny inheritance, let alone the right to ontological identity. But it is unconscious not to extend our identity to what surrounds us: the sky, the trees, the rain, the animals... and then the Other.
Could we, one day, think of the museum as the continuity of the world as it is? Will the museum ever be sensitive to the screams of the Earth and its inhabitants?
I don't have an answer to give, but I know that we will have to start by spending time looking at the stars, another time to fight with the Palestinians, and yet another to rescue the drowned in the Mediterranean... and so on. Until the day when museums let the wind in, and the foreigner inhabited.