Projects, Brutal Family Roots
Brutal Family Roots 2020
with Jordan Quinqueret, Nardean and MC Kronik
Brutal Family Roots, an immersive installation created for the Biennale of Sydney in 2020, marked a change in Mohamed Bourouissa’s perspective to include the whole of the living world. The artist extended his research, begun with Resilience Garden, conceived in 2018 for the Liverpool Biennial, where he explored the principle of migration, collaborative approaches, working with communities, as well as the function of the garden and the concern for living organisms. In Brutal Family Roots, Mohamed Bourouissa affirmed his willingness to dialogue with all forms of subjectivity. He now listens with the same attention to a plant, a writer, and any other living being...: they all embody polymorphous voices endowed with knowledge and authority. Expanding the world to all living things is necessarily subversive.
The yellow carpet on the floor refers to acacias when they bloom in winter. In classical iconography, the color yellow signifies treachery; here, it stands for misrecognition. On this floor stand arranged in large metal pots plants whose electrical activity is translated into sounds played through overhead speakers. This meditative installation reflects the artist’s childhood in Algeria, the acacia (another name for the mimosa) personifying for him the country of his birth through its sheer fragrance. Taking an interest in the colonial migration of plant species around the world, Mohamed Bourouissa retraced the first movements of acacias from Australia to Algeria by tracking natural history expeditions. The discovery of the Australian origin of the plant plunges his personal history into the history of globalization: far from being a contemporary invention, globalization goes back to the time of colonial empires. The mimosa, inscribed in the diasporic history of living things, echoes the historical violence of colonization. It undoes the very idea of identity by revealing its fictional character.
An algorithm based on the link between the dispersion and adaptation of plants of the acacia family and language sequences makes non-verbal communication audible. The active energy frequencies of the living acacia tree are transformed into perceptible rhythmic frequencies. The language of the acacias sounds a lot like a live electro music concert. Verbal interludes performed by the aboriginal hip-hop artist MC Kronic and the Egyptian-Australian rapper Nordean—epitomizing this globalized history—occasionally break up the hypnotic sounds generated by the plants, like bits of dialogue in a new kind of conversation between living beings.
Brutal Family Roots offers an immersive experience made possible by a holistic approach adopted by Mohamed Bourouissa from the outset of the project, which harnesses science, nature, language, collaboration, and “making together.” Among the notions of power at the heart of the artist’s work, control—over bodies, territory, language—has remained one of the most effective. Brutal Family Roots, a work of healing, invites us to take our time, to inhale the smell of the acacias, to listen to, or rather to perceive with our senses the story they tell, the complex narrative of intersecting migrations of humans and plants.
Guillaume Lasserre
Brutal Family Roots, 2020, mixed-media installation, acacia trees, carpet and sound, variable sizes, © Mohamed Bourouissa ADAGP
Shown at :
• HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!!, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (DK), 2021-2022
• HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!!, Goldsmiths CCA, London (UK), 2021
• 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Cockatoo Island, Sydney (AU), 2020
• Brutal Family Roots, kamel mennour gallery, Paris (FR), 2020
Exhibition view of HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!!, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (DK), 2021-2022. Photographs : David Stjernholm
NARDEAN
« I forgot my name, I forgot my name,I forgot my name,
but I remember my roots »
For every segment of soil my roots wrap around
They have a different name for me
« they always change my name »
But it never changes, i always grow
« I am here to turn potential evergreen »
To turn seed to stem to blooming structure
Once, I was bound to the land and only travelled « on the wind »
Then i moved across the« water »
From one side of the planet to the other to the other, to the other, to the other
« Like a thread sewing a jacket »
(JACKET - A)
Its starts off as a jacket in england
Add a Teh marboota,
« teh marbootah is a letter in the Arabic language. There's no actual translation for it »
it becomes jacketa - and suddenly we’re in the middle east
MC KRONIC
Faded memories reconstruct
« People who come from afar, I see all of you.
Aboriginal people camped here, at this place, long ago.
We embrace all of you; we open the door to all of you.
We lend this place to all of you to live while we sleep.
Here I see my country »
« My name is lost to the past »
But i still have my roots,
I used to hear the word « wattle »
When they came looking for me
They would watch me flower,
« the river bank »
where they'd stand,
Pieces of my fallen « sister » in hand,
Sometimes they would ask for my « leaves ».
And chew me to a paste,
Sealing their wounds,
With the « juice » that remained,
« Hello, welcome how are you? May I use your leaves »
Every time they’d take me - i died in their flesh
We are the only thing that can be of service in death
was in that place
For so long
watching « sky fire » come from the east,
Then leave to the west,
Time went on forever forever Endeavour Endeavour Endeavour
Then he came
Red and blue coats
Elongated muskets
Different ways they spoke
He called himself joseph banks
i can still feel him breathe,
The same way i felt it the first time he would speak,
The strength in his voice only matched,
By steel teeth,
They would push from side to side against me till my skin broke and I weeped,
August 3rd
Noone here says « wattle »
Theres salt in the air from the water,
one beam of sunlight through a crack,
In sync with the way that I sway,
Forwards then back,
Forwards then back,
back
back
Forwards
Forwards then back,
Then I hear a cry below from the depths of someone’s chest,
"Land up ahead"!
words echoed down from the top of his mast,
Were almost at England
Were almost at france
Were almost at algeria
I’ve met many strangers who have labelled me
But my roots still have their own memories,
I still have my kin,
sunshine, cold, rain, Or wind, a Australia, england, France, Algeria
Australia,
MC KRONIC
Faded memories reconstruct
« People who come from afar, I see all of you.
Aboriginal people camped here, at this place, long ago.
We embrace all of you; we open the door to all of you.
We lend this place to all of you to live while we sleep.
Here I see my country »
« My name is lost to the past »
But i still have my roots,
I used to hear the word « wattle »
When they came looking for me
They would watch me flower,
« the river bank »
where they'd stand,
Pieces of my fallen « sister » in hand,
Sometimes they would ask for my « leaves ».
And chew me to a paste,
Sealing their wounds,
With the « juice » that remained,
« Hello, welcome how are you? May I use your leaves »
Every time they’d take me - i died in their flesh
We are the only thing that can be of service in death
was in that place
For so long
watching « sky fire » come from the east,
Then leave to the west,
Time went on forever forever Endeavour Endeavour Endeavour
Then he came
Red and blue coats
Elongated muskets
Different ways they spoke
He called himself joseph banks
i can still feel him breathe,
The same way i felt it the first time he would speak,
The strength in his voice only matched,
By steel teeth,
They would push from side to side against me till my skin broke and I weeped,
August 3rd
Noone here says « wattle »
Theres salt in the air from the water,
one beam of sunlight through a crack,
In sync with the way that I sway,
Forwards then back,
Forwards then back,
back
back
Forwards
Forwards then back,
Then I hear a cry below from the depths of someone’s chest,
"Land up ahead"!
words echoed down from the top of his mast,
Were almost at England
Were almost at france
Were almost at algeria
I’ve met many strangers who have labelled me
But my roots still have their own memories,
I still have my kin,
sunshine, cold, rain, Or wind, a Australia, england, France, Algeria
Australia,
NARDEAN
Ingellerta, Faranca, Aljazeera
I was bought and sold,
You know how the humans love pleasure and gold
To be displaced, « lost »
« like an eyelash that flew away from the eye that was its home »
taken from my home,
Turned to a diaspora of flora
In the garden
Cannes
1864
Château de la Bocca
NABONNAND
New lands, new soil, new depths to dig,
But sand will make a salty mess of your foundations
dna says to grow to multiply, « in New ground »
I am an infinite experiment
Testing out el Maya « water »
Sometimes my experiments die
But that’s how i/we learn
Sometimes my experiments work,
Then we are hated
By our neighbors
When we stand
Asfar asfar
Asfar as far as you can see
The locals despise me
Call me a foreigner
How do you feel about me?
You know me,
You know i am everywhere
Loved and hated
They have torn me down, « they broke me ».
And they have named days after me
They use my flowers « to know when it is time ».
They use me to seek out your sweat.
I can’t remember where it first began
But i remember the trail of trauma
Carried from one edge to the other to the other to the other
I was born here