FRAGILE

of FATMI Mounir

FRANCE, 2002, 00:06:34

Production : FATMI Mounir
Genre : Video art
Keyword : Communication, Body, Experimental, Relation

Summary :

One may think that a work such as "Fragile" both differs and does not differ from all the formal researches undertaken by Mounir Fatmi, an artist who never fails to confront any social and political fact of the world i n general and of Morocco in particular. However, "Fragile" places us in the heart of a total decontex-tualization, outside of any possible world, and nevertheless it does not in the least take us away from humanity and its great existential interrogations. With an accomplished command of his art, the artist acts in such a way that we do not have the slightest exhaustive visual apprehension of bald black and white scenes, virtually "autistic" scenes which are characterized by a powerful coefficient of abstraction. There is also an electric and anxious tension, close to asphyxiation, which keeps the spectator in a state of expectancy which, in turn, draws him close to or takes him away from what is unusual towards what is familiar and vice versa, like the movement of a frightening metronome.The nodal "Object" of this film (which, beyond its specificity as a work of art, amply deserves to be characterized as a work belonging to purely experimental cinematography), outlines both meaningful and opaque stakes between two individuals.

An excerpt from the text "fragile" by Michel Cohen Hadria.


 
"(…)Fragile /  Fragile, 1997 is a black and white video shot in Tangier, Fatmi traced a white coaxial cable laid across the ground with his camera lens and the steps of bare feet. Barking dogs, crowing roosters, and other ambient sounds creep in through growing static to form the video’s soundtrack. Fatmi lays French and English text over his images: “If two things unite either the two survive and remain therefore two distinct entities or they disappear to become a third different thing or else only one of the two remains while the other ceases to be. Thus in the three cases union is made impossible.” With this quote, from the 12th century Muslim theologian Fakhr-ad din ar-Razi’s “A Commentary of Divine Names,” Fatmi uses ideologically charged words to question the possibility of reconciliation between foreign images and the domestic landscape. In Fatmi’s montage, the coaxial cable eventually dissolves, an outcome announced by French words scrawled in white chalk: “Communication fragile” (“fragile communication”). In the subsequent montage, Fatmi replaces the cable with a line of white powder, then a white rope. The rope snakes through the grass to a box television, and Fatmi returns to the chalk line, finally truncated and punctuated by two rough stones. He renders the possibility of communication impossible.
Fatmi’s photographic series The Link/Le Lien and his video Fragile mark some of the very first times that the artist appropriated white coaxial cables for the creation of his work. The artist continues to incorporate these white cables into his practice to indicate the transfer of images and information.(…)"

Lillian Davies, Excerpt from Suspect Language, Skira, 2012

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