It
is precisely in the loins of his culture and his identity where mounir fatmi's most recognizable
and iconic pieces delve into. It responds to a
technique that he has been using since 1998 and that receives the generic title
Racines. Made with white
antenna cable and presented in the form of spatial installations, sculptures,
or wall reliefs, the creator appeals to the entire tradition of Islamic art's
geometry and plant motif, to shape disturbing technological atauriques where the viewer
gets lost within an endless entanglement; a perfect metaphor of what contemporaneity is. The reference to
the term "root" that gives name to this entire line of research,
establishes a direct connection with the cultural origin of the artist and with
those contradictions that cause the stereotypes that arise around said substrate.
Racines 08, the piece shown
in this exhibition, is a wall sculpture that uses retro-technology, those
cables that used to connect television sets to their antennas and transmit
images, as a material in danger of extinction that, from a double perspective,
appeals to the concepts of archive, history and tradition, but also to all
those relationships that the artist establishes with the other cultures he
knows and that have influenced him.