In the Swiss Pavilion, Latifa Echakhch conjures up the essence of the art experience. She intentionally leaves visitors with a sense of joy and sadness.
Latifa Echakhch stages transience in the Swiss Pavilion.
Venice – this city is art made of stone. With all the patina of transience that is attached to good art. Unfortunately, it is besieged by tourism, but so is the Mona Lisa. But why do people from all over the world go to such places? Their magic enchants, certainly. You have to experience it once, you want to be able to talk about it: I was there, saw the original, with my own eyes. And of course you take something with you: in addition to a photo or a souvenir, you are sure to have a piece of memory.
After all, what else remains in our heads than the traces of memory when the picture on the mobile phone is lost in the sea of photo files and the thing made of colored glass and fake gold is gathering dust on the shelf at home? Memory – that is the still warm residue of a feeling, a mood, an aftertaste. And that definitely has a melancholic note. But why is the beauty and intensity, in which one has completely immersed oneself, in which one felt so well cared for, only shared when it is all over? Is it like paradise lost? Is this our lot?
Yes, says Latifa Echakhch, who will be exhibiting in the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale. But that’s what creates art, she adds. The native Moroccan, who has been living in Switzerland for more than ten years, gives a simple example: The feeling of elation that accompanies you for a long time when you leave a concert is actually the essence of the concert – this feeling of fulfillment, too which is followed by a somewhat painful reverberation that it is already over again.
Her art is about this essence, even now in her performance in Venice. And this essence is the essence of art that artists of all times have wanted to capture, says Latifa Echakhch in an interview that took place in her studio in Vevey before the opening of the Biennale.
In fact, painters have always captured the mood of landscapes, the intimate moment of a domestic genre scene, the presence of living nature in the form of a still life. But also the lavish village festival, the heroic battle, the religious revelation or ecstasy in the martyrdom of Christ or the feelings of love and passion in the visualization of the beauty of a female nude.
A look at the Swiss Pavilion, where Latifa Echakhch evokes the moment of art experience that has always passed.
But Latifa Echakhch would not be an artist up to date if she were to seek her art in such traditions. She is breaking new ground and doing it her very own way. And that’s pretty radical. In her work, she aims directly at the essence of art itself: this fact that art always seeks to conserve and condense what is already past.
Something has always happened and is already over in Latifa Echakhch’s works. Her installative, expansive works want to convey the feeling of a completed afterward. So now also in the Swiss Pavilion. Black, burnt wood lies on the gravel in the building’s courtyard. An orange glow lies over everything, as if there were still a glow present. Inside the pavilion, however, it is pitch black. Only pulses of orange light illuminate the room to a silent rhythm. One perceives huge heads stretching towards an invisible horizon and the gestures of huge hands.
Latifa Echakhch and view of the inner courtyard of the Swiss Pavilion in Venice.
Eight seconds of happiness
It can’t be a coincidence that Latifa Echakhch mentions the example of a concert. It is known from studies that our thoughts constantly switch back and forth between the past and the future. Even a person practiced in meditation can hardly bring it to a standstill for a long time. The longest period of time that the human psyche can remain continuously in the present is just eight seconds. This becomes possible when we listen to music.
However, we only have access to this merging in the now afterwards, when the moment has left its mark on our brainwaves. And Latifa Echakhch tries to capture these traces: “Visitors should leave the exhibition with the same feeling they have when they come out of a concert. That this rhythm, this contentment, still reverberate,” she says of her installation for the Swiss Pavilion.
Even her earlier works conveyed a kind of mood after an event. There was this installation with a canopy that had fallen from the ceiling like a theater curtain. Or these folding screens made of white fabric, over which clothing soaked in black paint had been placed so that the paint dripped down the fabric. Oversized, folklorically painted puppets stood in the room as if they had been parked after a procession.
The large heads in the Swiss pavilion, which are now made of wooden shingles and temporarily fastened together with thin metal clips, are somewhat reminiscent of such procession dolls. The light-colored wood, which the artist found in Venice in the pool of material from previous biennials, is slightly charred in one place or another. These heads could also come from straw dolls, as they are lit in many cultures at the bonfire around the solstice. In Switzerland, the ritual burning of the Böögg to say goodbye to winter on Zurich’s Sechseläutenplatz is well known.
The Swiss Pavilion as a stage for artistic melancholy, as understood by Latifa Echakhch.
On the one hand, Latifa Echakhch’s Biennale installation captures the moment after the burning and smoldering, when the charred wood is still smoking. At the same time, we are also involved in the mood of the process itself. In the midst of the luminous schemes of heads and hands, of gestures and postures, we become part of a heaving mass of spectators in the silent flickering of emotions. This production is poetic and minimalist at the same time. And Latifa Echakhch speaks of sadness and joy that she wants to convey with her work.
For the rhythmic light impulses of her work, the artist worked closely with the Geneva composer and percussionist Alexandre Babel. The result, however, is a completely silent installation. Only the footsteps of visitors on the gravel inside the pavilion can be heard. When asked why she covered the floor with this noisy surface, Latifa Echakhch says that everyone should feel their own rhythm when walking.
The artist is also a long-distance runner, she knows about the body’s own rhythm – and the so-called flow that arises from it: this feeling of a mental state of complete absorption in the moment, which is experienced as exhilarating. Her work «The Concert» is also an attempt at artistic recourse to it.
The question remains as to why the experience of art is always a “second-hand emotion”. Tina Turner sang about love, the notion of an emotion that has always been felt by someone before us. We look for this emotion and when we are absorbed in it, it slips away from us again. Art, however, keeps them to a certain extent for us.
Venice Art Biennale, Swiss Pavilion, April 23 to November 27.