Un après-midi à Larache , 2015 / 2016

Single-channel video installation, Color, sound, 9 min

In Un après-midi à Larache, Halloubi sets out to find the tomb of French writer Jean Genet. On his way, a narrative gets sparked by keeping the camera in his pocket. The recording leads Halloubi to a consideration of the effects of digital video imagery. Following a conjecture about digital video as autonomous storytellers-to-come, he suggests the technology to be a spectral one. If the fault line between moderns and their others can be brought back to that between in/animism, then Halloubi’s proposition is worth considering. If digital video imagery is a ghostly virus, then we live in a truly ubiquitous animist world! Subsequently, we find ourselves at another modern fault line – namely that of topopolitical boundaries. On this cliff, the focus slips into questions about the legitimacy of knowledge, the stories worth telling, and how pasts define access to the future. It is difficult to gain a foothold so as to find a way out while in limbo. Resuming his search for the tomb, the artist traces an opposite, or rather contrasting, path; the path of a stranger at home. Once at the tomb (it is actually there), the question of erasure comes to the fore again. Going about with tombs, stories and lives not ours anymore (but still). The monument as an event. Or, with it, imagining other stories to come.