About some temporary wool stories
"You never bathe in the same river twice." - Heraclitus
The work presented for Salone del Mobile 2022 is an immersive installation - in progress - that has been nourished by the fruitful collaboration between Moroccan contemporary artist Amine El Gotaibi and the Beni Rugs studio, based in the outskirts of Marrakech. This work is the result of a synergy found in a shared aesthetic language, common principles, and an exchange between the ancestral craft traditions of Morocco and contemporary conceptual thinking, where the artist entered an instructive and intimate dialogue with the women weavers of Beni Rugs.
In response to Beni Rugs' invitation, Amine El Gotaibi did not want to limit himself to a decorative or even scenographic exercise. Nor did he opt for a one-way artistic production. Thus, he invited the weavers of Beni Rugs to experience his exhibition Visite (MCC GALLERY, 2021-2022) where they had the opportunity to discover, amongst others, Perspective de brebis (2018) and Perspective de Séduction (2019), two major projects involving the animal and its wool; the common thread of the narrative.
One thing leading to another, El Gotaibi paints a portrait full of collective symbols and nostalgia, linking the history of a country, and of an entire continent, to the lives of these weavers who carry in their hands the trace of a distant Numidian land. This is the approach that the artist takes: by weaving together with them this gigantic natural woollen form, he demonstrates the magic of the craft and captures the fluid time that never ceases to escape us.
Like the Héraclian river, Amine El Gotaibi delivers a work in progress and tends to bring up the current of Time: the stories of these women flow through the woolen threads. They flow like the blood in the veins of a single, unified body, like the letters and anecdotes of the indivisible corpus of a civilisation in perpetual transformation. Here, everything flows but remains static: the natural wool travels from the production space in Tamesluht (Marrakech) to the exhibition space (Milan), and will eventually cross the Mediterranean again to return to the Atlas Mountains, the eternal symbol of national dignity and resistance.
