Mounir Fatmi

Mounir Fatmi
Work in the exhibition "Nafas"

The installation 500 meters of silence is conceived as writing, a calligraphic system connected to our imaginary. With absolutely nothing to see, the display of the installation incites us to remember what we have already seen or believed to have seen.

This weaving without beginning or end forms arabesques, invades the space, and evokes at first sight the visual vocabulary of Islamic culture. Here, the materials are no longer paint, stucco, or mosaics from mediaeval Islam, but a white aerial cable. The five hundred meters of aerial cables, cut and deprived of their transmitting functions are unreeled on the ground and spread out in contrast to the painting and sound. They turn into a plain element with visual and decorative qualities. It is with this invading entanglement of cables that a fear of empty space and a kind of “all over” of information and over-mediation are epitomized.

On the one side, the installation functions like an organized chaos, and on the other, it creates a rupture. That, which previously connected, now separates, exasperates, and crystallizes fear, danger, and violence. The transmission of information resembles this ceaseless system of seductive and decorative interlacing in calligraphic lines, whose formal beauty captures and diverts the sense of things. The image painted on the wall shows a dog, tied up and deprived of food. The dog’s growl that is amplified in the installation sends us right back to the famous experiment of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936)1. This experiment consisted in activating the animal’s salivation by presenting it with food in order to collect samples of saliva.
Publicar entradafter several days, the researcher realized that the dog already started to drool at the mere sound of his approaching footsteps. Then Pavlov repeated the experiment by ringing a bell just before feeding time. Result: the sound of the bell made the dog drool. Socio-psychologists have adapted the same initial animal model to theorize the influence of publicity on consumers.

These experimental results have enabled us to understand the interaction between an explicit and an implicit attitude. One can thus question our society as to the measure of our conditioning through either flow or absence of information and the subsequent influence on our faculties of judgment and opinions. In her text “the intelligence of an explosive system”