Meriem Bennani. For My Best Family

Conversation between Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani, Niccolò Gravina, Mario Mainetti Texts by Daniel Arnold, Maïa Tellit Hawad, Chrissie Iles, Norman M. Klein, Emily LaBarge, Lars LaLa and Abdellah Taïa

Combining a new site-specific, large-scale installation with an art film co-directed with Orian Barki, this project explores ways of being together in public and intimate socio-political settings. This project is the most ambitious work Bennani has ever done both in terms of complexity, size and the length of the creative process, which took more than two years to complete. It is part of a line of programming that Fondazione Prada has been pursuing for more than thirty years, involving collaborations with international artists to create utopian projects that are both conceptually and aesthetically complex.

Meriem Bennani (Morocco, 1988) explores the potential of storytelling while amplifying reality through a strategy of fantastical imagery and humor, juxtaposing and mixing the language of YouTube videos, reality TV, documentaries, animation, and high-production aesthetics. Throughout her career, she has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures and immersive installations, composed with a subtle agility to question our contemporary society and its fractured identities, gender issues, and ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies.

As Bennani explains, "A central theme of 'For My Best Family' is how to be together, questioning where we start and stop as people. It unfolds in the two levels of the Podium, the main exhibition building of the Milan headquarters. Combining a new site-specific, large-scale installation with an art film co-directed with Orian Barki, "For My Best Family" explores ways of being together in public and intimate socio-political settings. This project is the most ambitious work Bennani has ever done both in terms of complexity, size and the length of the creative process, which took more than two years to complete. It is part of a line of programming that Fondazione Prada has been pursuing for more than thirty years, involving collaborations with international artists to create utopian projects that are both conceptually and aesthetically complex.

Bennani is developing a multi-sensory environment for Fondazione Prada. It unfolds in the two levels of the Podium. On the ground floor, Sole crushing is a large mechanical installation that animates 192 flip-flops and slippers into a ballet-symphony-riot and musical composition. The soundtrack was composed in collaboration with music producer Reda Senhaji aka Cheb Runner. This kinetic and complex system is designed as an archipelago of polyphonic groups in which a multitude of flip-flops are arranged in different conformations: two "orchestras," two spiral sculptures and a central island. Each item is connected to a pneumatic system that makes it mobile, alive, and breathing and to a drum surface made of various materials that amplify the sound of the object that hits it. This humorous and organic space will evoke states of collective catharsis, chaotic and organized collective rituals like traditional Moroccan musical forms such as the deqqa marrakchia, architectures of spectacle like stadiums, states of delirium or hallucination, and protest.

The first floor of the Podium will host a cinema-like space to screen For Aicha, a new art film directed by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki under the creative production of John Michael Boling and Jason Coombs. Set between New York, Rabat and Casablanca, in a world populated by anthropomorphic animals and suspended between realism, autobiography, and fiction, this artwork is the culmination of a long creative process that blends documentary and 3D animation languages.

For Aicha follows Bouchra, a 35-year-old Moroccan jackal and filmmaker living in New York, as she writes an auto-biographical film exploring how her queerness has impacted her mother Aicha, a cardiologist jackal living in Casablanca. The story blends fiction -Bouchra's film within the film- with an adaptation of recorded non-fiction conversations between Bennani and her mother. With tenderness and humor, both "filmmaker Bouchra" and "fictional Bouchra" seek to understand the nuances of their mother's love and pain in order to move forward with their lives. The decision to use animated animals in this and previous works is a deliberate way of smuggling complicated messages in innocuous-seeming vessels. The narrative form of animation thus becomes a powerful device for addressing current and emerging topics in an inventive and intriguing form.