Artists

Camille Soualem

Press release

This anger hasn’t let up since Tuesday June 27, 2023, when Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old young Frenchman of Moroccan and Algerian descent, was shot at point-blank by a police officer. Trauma, as Freud once tried to expose it [2], is a psychic process made out of many temporalities. It only manifests itself in “afterwardness”, retroactively, with one shock re-articulating another buried in the memory. It’s in such a way that Camille Soualem recollects the time where she witnessed the memorial anniversary of the massacre of the 17th october of 1961 near the Beaux-Arts de Paris, where she once was a student. “Here, we drown Algerians” (Ici on noie des algériens): the graffiti written along the banksides of the Seine a few weeks after the event was photographed. But the picture only came out in the press 24 years later, in the newspaper L’Humanité. The aftermath reveals not only the act of violence, but also its repression or concealment, one added to the other, revealing the exercise of a systemic policy. Because before Algerians were killed, they were first “killable”, as sociologist and writer Kaoutar Harchi writes about Nahel [3]: “He was exposed to it. He was taking this risk of being a victim of it. Racial domination is all about this risk that simply exists”.

Camille Soualem’s painting now resonates with the meeting of the aftermath and the unveiling of risk driven by a political strategy of domination. As its name suggests, the aftermath is what comes after. After the trauma, after its repetition, after the realization that was right there in front of us, something that had always been there, was only asking to be seen and explored. Something that affected Camille Soualem, because it affected others before her, several generations who had been silent. “My collective body is angry”, she told me: this anger became her strength to paint. Paint it all. With oils. The paintings, the bodies, the written words, the reading of the poem and its inflammatory power on the night of October 31st (After Yannis Briki’s “Bonne nuit Xali”), the furniture, the outside doors and their insides, the pinky bedroom, the dresser, the wardrobe, the unmade bed, the pictures, the books on the bed and on the floor, forging the elements, or rather the “events” of a space and time of resistance.

For the first time, Camille Soualem presents it in a miniaturized version: the bedroom. A population of pictures and books scaled down for this interior - and the insideness it suggests - inhabits the place, haunt it, and also give it a function: « it is in the bedroom, says Camille, where a second education is created, one that owes nothing to the State or its institutions”. In the bedroom, the painted body has disappeared to make room for the body - our own - being involved in reading, decoding a title and getting to know a cover. This involvement is also embodied, like a kickback, in the painting Origines, a fragment of a naked body turned around “like Courbet’s Origin of the World reversed”, says Camille. Indeed, she flips the point of view in order to put the one that is being painted and the ones that are looking in the extension of her legs, her pubis, her belly, as if its was their own. A book thrones upon her/our tight, exhorting us to stay barbaric as writen by its author Louisa Yousfi (original french title : Rester Barbare ; original english title : In Defense of Barbarism: Non-whites Against the Empire). This physical contact with writing might be a reading guide, a way to look out for a truth as close as possible to the intimate, refusing the integration to a patriarchal, colonial and heteronormative civilization which has imposed upon us its vision of the origin, if not of the whole world.

« In the bedroom there are, among others : La prochaine fois le feu, James Baldwin ; Un fanzine de mon amie Kmar Daougi ; Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg ; Ce que le sida m’a fait, Elisabeth Lebovici ; Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde ; Des paillettes sur le compost, Myriam Bahaffou ; La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr ; La race tue deux fois, Rachida Brahim ; La puissance des mères, Fatima Ouassak ; albums by Dahmane El Harrachi, Isha et Medine ». By faithfully reproducing these book’s covers, Camille Soualem not only delivers her own bibliography, she also encourages us to become one with the reading. To become one with this corpus. Not to stay alone : « to give up nothing, to give up no one » just like Dorothy Allison was writing. It is, maybe – without a doubt – the best way to describe an exhibition.

– Elisabeth Lebovici