Tout est chaos.
Their voices in chorus resound, this night. All is chaos. This phrase from a thousand throats is transformed into a song of struggle, transmitted from generation to generation. The echo goes back much further, millennia, when the first peoples of water and sand sang.
In this exhibition, Aïcha Snoussi continues the work of installation and drawing around a queer archaeology, tying up the history of a disappeared civilization on the Mediterranean sides. Through the khàos – the rift – her work cracks in the narratives of official history to accommodate other narratives. Mirroring the pieces of the Lattara museum collection, new remains tell the story of the bodies that still sing under the sea.
Tout est chaos. Aïcha Snoussi
Exhibition from 19 November 2022 to 3 April 2023
Discussion between Aïcha Snoussi and Diane Dusseaux, Director of the Lattara Archaeological Site – Henri Prades Museum
In the vein of your previous exhibitions (MOCO, Zinsou Foundation, Palais de Tokyo), “Tout est chaos” speaks of a submerged civilization whose history has left no trace. How did this passion for an imaginary Atlantis come about?
“Tout est chaos” is part of a series of exhibitions exploring the rediscovered traces of a nomadic, queer, and African civilization—the Tchechs. It is an archaeological fiction that has been developed over the years and takes shape through drawing, collections of objects, and installations. “La Sépulture aux noyé.e.s,” presented at Mo.Co during the “Cosmogonies” exhibition, is one of the first artifacts, representing an ancient ritual site in memory of those lost at sea.
The origins of this project likely trace back to childhood and an obsession with collections of bottles, stones, shells, and an array of unique objects. I reconnected with these initial inventory gestures upon discovering a batch of old school notebooks in 2016, on a street in Tunis. These series of notebooks later formed a fictional encyclopedia – “Le livre des anomalies / كتاب الشذوذ” – that unfolds infinitely. It is through this process that the connections between drawing, fiction, and remnants of a lost civilization began to intertwine. It also stems from an archaeological approach to drawing, a relationship with the world through its depths. Initially in form, through methodologies like incisions, excavations, and anatomical cuts, but also through incisions in historical narratives. Fiction, for me, is a tool like a qalam or a blade with paper, opening breaches in history as it is transmitted and slipping into its blind spots. In these gaps, a thousand stories have been erased, made invisible, or engulfed, such as those of queer narratives, migrations, exiles, and crossings.
The practice of writing plays a very strong role in your work, both through the creation of narratives, archaeological fictions, and the almost omnipresent use of drawing. With this exhibition, you take the narrative process even further by appropriating the museographic codes inherent in the archaeological discipline. How did you come up with this proposal?
The question of place is crucial for me, which is why my practice of drawing and fiction develops in immersive installations, spreading through space, poetically inhabiting the locations. The exercise here was unique; the museum is already laden with stories and objects, unlike contemporary art spaces that are more or less neutral. Immersing myself in the museum’s collections and their scenography, I realized that I had an opportunity to create a dialogue between disciplines and situate my work in a new dimension. That’s how the idea of infiltration into the museum through a play of museographic replicas came about. I then cataloged the various methods of presenting artifacts: showcases, pedestals, numbering, staging, and experimental archaeology. From there, I had a lot of fun doing the opposite of what I usually do, that is, arranging, organizing, framing, and classifying like a forger.
This approach allowed me to delve into a reflection on scientific authority and its presentation devices: Once an object is sealed under glass, numbered, dated, and historiographically contextualized, it imposes a narrative whose subjectivity and veracity are challenging to question. This exercise of slipping into history is intimately linked to my drawing practice, which subverts the codes of a form of knowledge constructed through classification and hierarchy. Similarly, the inscriptions found on scrolls, notebooks, engraved on bone, or on the foosball table are inspired by ancient Chamito-Semitic alphabets but deliberately remain undecipherable. The inscriptions blend, and the texts are not meant to be translated. These assemblages are precisely there to tell something else, to form a new language.
Your work is deeply engaged in a profound reflection on memory and its transmission devices, with a particular interest in the margins of societal history. Is this also a means for you to dedicate a space of expression to queer culture – that is, gender and sexual identities that are not heteronormative – to which you identify/feel connected?
Growing up as queer, we face an invisibility of our experiences, a form of historical blindness. This doesn’t mean that queer, trans, or non-binary identities didn’t exist, but rather that the “grand narrative” as it is taught relegates them to its shadowy corners. Binary thinking and heteronormativity are the vectors and pillars of a patriarchal society, to which any form of otherness constitutes a form of threat to be repressed. However, when you look beyond these discourses, plural forms of gender and sexuality have always existed, especially in the non-Western world. From Babylonian deities like Tiamat to Al-Tharifat and Moussajilet, the masculine-lesbian women of ancient Arab cities, to the figure of khawal in Egypt or the recognition of multiple genders in Indonesia and Native American cultures.
Here, the fiction of the Tchechs slips into these invisible zones of history, questioning its methods of writing and transmission. If history is situated, that is, written and recounted by bodies that have dominated others, then there are worlds buried between its pages. The question of memory is at the center of this work, a way of witnessing realities by telling the story of imaginary ancestors. There is also a broader dimension; from this queer history, it is a window into our traces as a human species. In contact with these objects, bones, and remnants of experiences, it’s a mirror on evanescence, disappearance, and all the stories already lining the depths of the seas.
A recurrent color in your works is the blue-green you call “vermanie.” What does it represent for you?
It’s a color that has fascinated me for a very long time; I already had several blue-green objects that I collected. When I brought them together one day, I had this particular sensation that each object lost its utility to tell a new story. This color transformed into a substance, a kind of underground aquosity that would be emblematic of the civilization. Never entirely blue nor entirely green, it has something elusive and majestic. It is also the color of copper oxidation, a symbol of time passing on things, of what has lived. Some insects and birds carry this color, such as peacocks, butterflies, flies, beetles, dragonflies, geese, and even my grandmother.
This substance appears in object collections, but also in certain elements, like the ruins of an old movie poster where Layla and AbdelHalim Hafedh merge into this androgynous, fragmented face. In the fiction, the Tchechs have a cult around the sea, one that attracts and one that drowns. This vermanie substance then becomes a symbol of the power of water, of travel, drift, exile, and secrets hidden in the depths.
The terms “archaeology” or “archaeologist” are often used to describe your artistic approach. However, this is the first time you have been invited to exhibit in an archaeological museum. What will you take away from this experience?
It was a very enriching experience. It’s the first time I’ve encountered a team working in the field, surrounded by objects that have spanned time. I was able to discover both how history comes together, piece by piece, and is narrated, but I also gained access to methodologies for studying human bones, for example, as well as the scientific language specific to archaeology, which I’m eager to engage with as a new tool. The fact that Lattara was a port surrounded by the Lez river anchors the fiction more in reality, as this place could have been one of the many passages of the civilization. By intersecting with the ongoing excavations in the region, it also allows for connections with fiction: I learned about the recent discovery of tree stumps off the coast of Palavas, which attests to the existence of an ancient forest underwater. These remnants directly echo those of a submerged civilization and weave dense connections between archaeology and contemporary art. These parallels then raise reflections on climate crises in human history and plunge the fiction into other dimensions: This submerged civilization could be a reminiscence of our own.
© Marc Domage
