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Story Mapping

excerpt
Bouchra Khalili, Unpredictable cartographies – Here and there
Pascale Cassagnau
(excerpt, p. 37-38)


(...)

For many years already, the association between contemporary art and the documentary has turned out to be particularly fruitful. The document and the archives as question and method have established a real horizon of thought for contemporary creation. The emergence of the document in the economy of knowledge modifies – and has modified throughout the 20th century – the status of memory. As a matter of fact, the image endows memory with a support, a prism of reflection, which focuses on the object of the memory and on the memory of the object. Besides, the document generates types of assemblings and editings which are the supports for the elaborations of stories, for historicisation forms. Besides, the elaboration of archives crosses an interrogation on History and on the peculiar and personal stories. The territory of the documentary then indicates a way of making movies shared by artists and film-makers: that is to say a non-linear way to organise the cinematic elements, away from the strictly narrative structures.

A founding member of the “Cinémathèque de Tanger” with the artist Yto Barrada in particular, Bouchra Khalili works on the borderline between visual arts and cinema. Her films – installations or movies – relating to documentary essays, in the fragmentary sense of the term, deals with the notions of movement, relation and distance, between physical and imaginary geographies. With the form of short stories, these short movies establish systems of notations, as visual phrases, involving writing and language, meant to decipher signs found in urban spaces or in landscapes. The notations are articulated with descriptions, as tools for decoding and interpreting with images.

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