Nothing is silly to Meriem Bennani

“It all started with a pair of flip-flops,” Moroccan visual artist Meriem Bennani explains. In her latest exhibition, For My Best Family, commissioned by the Fondazione Prada, Meriem transcends the corporeal by using complex forms of personal and socio-political storytelling to explore the theme of ‘togetherness’. The ground floor of her multisensory exhibition features a large-scale mechanical installation entitled Sole Crushing. Composed of 192 flip-flops and slippers, the kinetic piece transforms into a “ballet-symphony-riot and musical composition” that was arranged in collaboration with music producer Reda Senhaji, aka Cheb Runner.

Originally published in Dazed MENA issue 00 | Order here

With her uncanny way of using beauty and play to tap into the spheres of human emotions, Meriem’s art attracted global attention during COVID with the video series 2 Lizards, made in collaboration with Orian Barki. Chances are you’ve stumbled across the video of two green lizards on a rooftop in New York, chatting anxiously about their first week of quarantine as a band of animals serenade the block with a Miles Davis-type beat. She’s also responsible for the iridescent fly that sings Rihanna’s Kiss It Better as it roams the streets of Rabat, Morocco, addressing the orientalist binaries delineating the ‘East’ and ‘West’. Capturing the oftentimes helpless existential dread and political realities of modernity with biting humour and magical surrealism, Bennani probes the human spirit in sometimes uncomfortable ways, while eliciting intense feelings of empathy at a time when many have become desensitised. Her latest show is no exception. 

“At the very early stages of art-making, I tend to follow my emotional instincts,” she says. “I have always been very interested in flip-flops. Even before this exhibition at the Fondazione, I had created a very small sculpture using a pair and knew that I eventually wanted to expand on it… When I finally visited the Podium [the space in Milan where For My Best Family is currently being exhibited], I knew this would be the perfect opportunity to do it.”

From the idea of that singular object, Meriem playfully and profoundly connects her work back to a variety of commonly felt human emotions and experiences. “First of all,” she says, “I feel like there is something very cartoon-esque about flip-flops. They are typically made of rubber, which enables them to move in a very elastic or expressive way… As someone who has always loved old-school animation, they feel like a real-world object that could potentially embody some of the character traits or personalities I have encountered in cartoons.”

“Flip-flops are typically at the bottom of the fashion food chain,” she says, acknowledging the work’s location at the Fondazione Prada. “And yet everyone seems to have some sort of relationship with them, regardless of where they come from. “If you mention the word, I guarantee that they will react – most people either own a pair, hate them, have distinct memories of being hit by one for disciplinary purposes… The list goes on. There appears to be this very clear thread in the way that they connect us as human beings – as if they are some sort of common denominator. I mean, they’re everywhere. We mass produce millions per year, despite it being really terrible for the environment.”

So what could one style of shoe say about our collective behaviour as human beings? “When you see a random pair of flip-flops on the floor, you can easily imagine a human body – someone’s feet and legs occupying the negative space. This led me to wonder what it would look like if we put hundreds together,” she says. “Would it resemble a crowd? Of course, my mind moved immediately to protests, a type of crowd that many of us have engaged with over the past few years.”

Those that have might agree there is something empowering about the act of protest, as people from all walks of life come together. “You are united by a single emotional thread,” says Meriem, “which begins to physically manifest in the form of chants and collective movements. Apart from protests, this led me to think about different types of collaborative music and dance, which are, in many cases, also rooted in emotional unity and passion. Some examples that came to mind were the deqqa marrakchia or the Gnawa, both of which are traditional Moroccan musical forms that, in their very spiritual or ritual-like nature, evoke collective moments of catharsis… I like to call them suspended moments of social utopia, where for a brief period, people are purely connected through movement and sound.”

Put together, these ideas inspired Meriem to create “one giant instrument” made almost entirely out of the aforementioned footwear. “I collaborated with engineers to create an entire network of tapping, where the flip-flops are making music but, at times, can quickly transform into protest mode through more chaotic forms of movement and sound.” The installation depicts the unsung juxtaposition of mankind – where, in beauty and pain, we are all united by a common thread. Even at our lowest points, the artist reminds us that, as social and emotional beings, we are never completely alone.

“I always begin from the principle that nothing is silly,” explains Meriem. “Even an object as simple as a flip-flop can contain so much depth… And regardless of all the imaginative themes that inspired the installation, I want everyone to take something different away from it. If I were to prescribe a specific meaning to the work, then it would become boring,” she says. “From the very start, my point of entry has always been emotion. I am driven to achieve some sort of sensory experience through my work… In the case of this installation, I didn’t simply seek to touch on moments of being in a crowd; I wanted to recreate the precise feeling of it.”

On the upper floor of the exhibition, Meriem uses a combination of animation and documentary-style film to address queer identity. Having transformed the exhibition space into a cinema, she is showing For Aïcha, a film that the artist co-directed with Orian Barki under the creative production of John Michael Boling and Jason Coombs. Set between the cities of New York, Rabat and Casablanca, the film “follows Bouchra, a 35-year-old Moroccan jackal and filmmaker living in New York, as she writes an auto-biographical film exploring how her personal identity has impacted her mother Aïcha, a cardiologist living in Casablanca.” Although the film is technically fiction, it incorporates real conversations between Bennani and her mother. “It was honestly difficult to create this film,” she says. “I knew that it didn’t have to represent every Moroccan, yet I still felt some sort of responsibility…”

I was really paralysed by the idea that two different audiences could interpret the film in profoundly different ways. First of all, it was never my intention to appeal to Western sympathies. I didn’t want the film to be perceived as a ‘cry for help’ or a think piece on the struggles of being a minority within the Arab community. If the film had even come close to expressing that sort of narrative, I would have stopped making it. You can already find so many stories like that on French TV… I really wanted to stay away from perpetuating any colonial narratives that might, once again, inspire Western paternalism or the ‘liberation’ of Arabs. In my opinion, this rhetoric is not only harmful but completely untrue… All countries are struggling with some form of conservatism, and that most definitely
includes the West.”

At the same time, Bennani explains that she didn’t want this fear to prevent her from sharing her own personal experiences. “I really wanted to push back against this idea that we need to take ‘progress’ or ‘modernity’ exactly as it is given to us by the West… I think, for all North Africans and Arabs, it is important that we embrace our own understanding of contemporary social culture – one that can fit within the mould of our very own context, values and traditions. Using storytelling and visuals, my goal is to prove that this is possible. Through their ‘Moroccaness’, I believe, parents and children can truly learn to love and find space for one another, regardless of how the latter choose to identify themselves.” 

Navigating these two paths, Bennani says, can be extremely difficult. “It took a really long time for me to figure out how I could tell the same story to both audiences… This struggle definitely inhibited my creativity.” That was until the artist decided to finally sit down with her mother. “I was feeling very blocked, so I thought it might be helpful to approach my parents and learn about how they dealt with my personal identity… The conversations with my mother turned out to be particularly beautiful, so we decided to incorporate them into the film.”

Those conversations changed everything. Although the film remains primarily fiction, it transformed into something much more authentic and true to Bennani’s personal experiences. “It all became really meta,” she says. “The film is not about coming out… In fact, I think it tries to push back against this Western idea of ‘coming out’ as the pinnacle of liberation. Instead, true freedom, I believe, requires a much greater form of cultural and emotional acceptance.”

Originally published in Dazed MENA issue 00 | Order here