The artistic committee of the ADAGP / Bétonsalon Grant met on May 23th, 2022 and chose Abdessamad El Montassir as laureate. He is the fifth artist benefiting from this grant after franck leibovici (2017), Liv Schulman (2018), Euridice Zaituna Kala (2019) and Anne Le Troter (2021).

The ADAGP / Bétonsalon grant, formerly associated with Villa Vassilieff, amounts to 20,000 euros and aims to accompany an artist in the development of a research, during several months. Bétonsalon – Center for art and research accompanies the artist in their research and production process, the artist receives a 5,000 euros honorarium and 10,000 euros for production.

The artistic project: Memory of Ashes

Originally from the Sahara South of Morocco (Western Sahara), Abdessamad El Montassir grew up in the town of Boujdour. This is the region where the project Memory of Ashes is located, a project he would like to develop with the research and production grant he received from ADAGP / Bétonsalon.

In this research, Abdessamad El Montassir wants to evoke the invisibility of the recent history of the Sahara, the traumas it has experienced and the way they are transmitted. He will attempt to test alternative means of transmission that respect the right to be forgotten, and the way these traumas can be the basis for a new form of historization. What happens to stifled memories, confiscated from collective imagination? What can images show or recount? How do you share “emptiness”, “absence”, “a ghost”? What shape does one give to forgetting?

Until 1991, the Sahara South of Morocco was the backdrop to a long conflict that left Saharan civil society deeply wounded. The populations settled in urban areas to escape the conflicts, putting an end to their traditional lifestyle, their freedom of movement, and above all, various ancestral forms of transmission. Today, despite à ceasefire approved by the UN, tensions still exist.

Using Sahara South of Morocco as the main study site for new forms of creation and experiments with transmission of memory, this project will be inspired by the book Necessità dei volti and its annexes, preserved at the Kandinsky Library. There are very few copies of this book; not a single one exists in the region. Thus, despite this publication, there are still no local archives. This absence of archive opens with questions that concern the possession and spread of images, particularly when they involve war or colonization situations: Who is speaking? From where? Instead of whom?

With this project, Memories of Ashes, Abdessamad El Montassir will envisage future trajectories of individual, collective, human and non-human identities, in response to the absence of a narrative and the amnesia that haunt the Sahara.