Since the beginning of the 2000s, artist, director, producer and teacher Katia Kameli has been developing a dense and multifaceted body of work. Grounded in two cultures – French and Algerian – she questions the blind spots of history, taking up the role of an intermediary between different territories. Following the paths she herself has chosen, she makes connections between distant facts, repairs broken relationships and ensures the voices of those who have been ignored are heard. In so doing, she writes a counter-narrative in which her different subjects of research mingle and combine to weave together a multitude of perspectives. Kameli’s art lies at the crossroads of poetry, visual studies and artisanal techniques. It is the fruit of a construction of relationships, relations that are built out of affinity, proximity and friendship. Her first solo show in these two Parisian cultural institutions brings together an ensemble that includes existing works and her new production. The exhibition at ICI puts her creations of the last 20 years under the spotlight. It showcases a consistent approach in which narratives circulate and are transformed, transposed and superposed across different places and times. In the exhibition, Kameli takes on the role of a translator: her photos, videos, drawings and installations bring into play a formal and conceptual language that comes together in an in-between space situated between different languages, sounds, aesthetics and cultures. Le Cantique des oiseaux [The Canticle of the Birds], a project co-produced by La Criée, Centre for contemporary art in Rennes includes a video she filmed in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood of Paris in partnership with the Conservatoire du 18e – Gustave Charpentier. Stream of Stories, a work that addresses the theme of metamorphosis in Kalîla wa Dimna, the fables that inspired Jean de La Fontaine, is enhanced by a tufted tapestry designed in collaboration with textile artist Manon Daviet. The exhibition at Bétonsalon is organised around the Roman algérien; it presents the three videos that comprise the latter (shot between 2016 and 2019) and reveals Kameli’s research for a fourth chapter that takes as its starting point La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua [The Nubah of the Women of Mount Chenoua], a film directed by the Algerian filmmaker and novelist Assia Djebar in 1977. By basing itself on the first Algerian film directed by a woman (copies of which still circulate today), Kameli seems to be continuing the work of Djebar, who looked back at the stories of women in the resistance during the war for independence in the town and mountains of Cherchell. By collecting accounts from women of different generations, she composes a polyphonic, living narrative in which personal and collective stories are made audible amidst the complexities of a colonial past. The title of the exhibition, “Yesterday is returning and I can hear it“, comes from Women of Algiers in Their Apartments, a 1980 novel by Assia Djebar.

Research and Production Grant ADAGP / Bétonsalon 2022 Trab’ssahl means “The Land of the West” in Hassanya and refers to a large part of Sahrawi territory. It is on this land, in this language, in the largely ignored history of an uninterrupted conflict for nearly 50 years, between sovereignty and autonomy, that Abdessamad El Montassir’s work is anchored. “All that we have experienced, we cannot say. Ask the ruins, ask the desert and its thorny plants. They have seen and experienced everything, they have remained in place. We no longer have the words.” These are the words of Khadija who left her nomadic life for the city in 1975. Powerful though idle, they set out for Abdessamad El Montassir a programme he has been carrying out since 2015: how to show what cannot be seen, how to listen to what cannot be said? What happens to prevented and confiscated memories? What form should oblivion take? In response to the collective amnesia that haunts the Sahara in South Morocco, Abdessamad El Montassir proposes to listen to the silent voices, the resistant poetry, the winds and the sand, the toponymy, to observe resilient plants and to detect everywhere the signs of a traumatic memory. Whether they are human or non-human voices, they become witnesses, even if only partially, to those who are able to listen.

For its first exhibition Semblable à un petit os de seiche (Like a small cuttlefish bone), the soap collective invited ten artists freshly graduated from, or still studying in, Dominique Figarella’s studio at the ENSBA (Paris), and Sarah Tritz’s “Art department” of the EnsAD school (Paris). These artists share the same awareness of their everyday environment through the recollection of images, gestures and objects as means of producing rich narrative and formal works of art. The exhibition intends to reflect this attention to the various signs of our close environment — a sensibility oriented in such a way that our banal reality appears elevated. “When I eat a crispy rusk, I can’t hear the sound of the radio” Nathalie Quintane, Remarques. The artists we have invited share the same attention, the same perceptive sensibility to reality, in the recording of its ordinariness. Their economical approach is rather a re-positioning of manufactured goods than the emergence of a new form, as if they were trying to underline the existing, latent reality that is often left invisible. Thus, the work of art can guide the eye to point out the unseen. This action reveals these works as small monuments or supporting structures that hold and heighten the object they shelter. All these collected objects (boxes, packagings, crates, fabrics, plastic structures) raise the question of the skin as a carnal envelope — something that prints, molds, delimits a matrix to be left eventually. Those receptacle-objects which remain empty can be considered as the witness of a fossilized trace left by a living being. But, on the other hand, some of them that are more inhabited register the fluids of a moving organism and crystallize its substance. This way of highlighting a body that left its clothing or an item that extricated itself from its box underlines an ambiguity between presence and absence. There, maybe the use of narration could surpass these antagonism and fictionalize reality. Rather than considering those objects through their relation with shared or buried memories, we could see them as means of sharing unique stories. The biscuit wrapper, the tea spoon and the crumbs constellated on the tablecloth could become true protagonists of our tales. The various works that we have here assembled show us that reality could become a matter of fiction, if we pay attention to it.

This group exhibition is inspired by a unique concept of listening that the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) refers to as Deep Listening, which, in her words, “involves going beneath the surface of what is heard.” At the heart of this practice is an acute awareness of the fact that there is always more to hear “beneath the surface” of the audible, in the recesses of the acoustic environment. The Deep Listening experience is open to new forms of sensoriality and represents a commitment to continue developing our listening skills through scores that, rather than guiding the interpretation of music, suggest attentional strategies and ways of listening to ourselves, others and the environment. In Oliveros’ work, the practice of attention is most often conducted in a collective setting. In most of her compositions, she provides open-ended indications that must be negotiated collectively by the performers, involving a great deal of attention and receptivity to others and to what is happening. The exhibition “Un· Tuning Together” brings Pauline Oliveros’ practice face to face with those of artists whose research reflects and expands on her proposals. Each artist is invited to inhabit the entire space and to share with participating audiences practices that bring into play the principles of improvisation and mutual listening within a group. Their proposals alternate in a programme of collective work and public performances. Oliveros’ work will also be practised collectively through regular sessions dedicated to the experience of Sonic Meditations. Her work has become a kind of catalyst for thinking collectively – with artists, researchers, participating audiences and the Bétonsalon team – about how bodies involved in these listening practices can generate changes on both personal and social levels. This exhibition is the second part of “Dissolving your ear plugs“, curated by Maud Jacquin with Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, at the Musée d’art de Joliette, Québec, from June 11 to September 4, 2023.