Garden Conversation, 2014

HD video

16' 21"

Commissioned
by Abraaj Group Art Prize, 2014.

'Garden Conversation'takes as a departure point an historical fact reported by manyaccounts, but that has not been documented: the meeting in Cairo in January 1959 at the Embassy of Morocco of Ernesto Guevara and the old exiled Moroccan hero of the RifWar (1921-1926 ), Abdelkrim Al Khattabi (Ajdir, Northern Morocco, 1882 ; Cairo,1963).A precursor of the anti-colonial struggle, Al Khattabi fought two colonial armies (Franceand Spain), and invented and experimented modern methods of Guerilla warfare thatinspired many anti-colonial leaders as Ho Chi Minh and Ernesto Guevara.55 years after Guevara and Khattabi's meeting, and nearly 3 years after the beginning ofthe Arab Spring, Khalili examine a hypothesis in the form of a poetic meditation:what the ghosts of Guevara and Khattabi would tell to each other if they were meetingtoday?The artist takes inspiration both from Walter Benjamin’s « On the Concept of History » andfrom the « Hauntology » as Jacques Derrida defined it in his « Spectres of Marx » (1993),to approach history as a constellation of traces of the past haunting the present-time toinform it, and eventually opening up a window on the perception of a potential future.For Garden Conversation, Khalili proceeds to a series of displacements in terms of history,geography, language, and visual approach, to build up the apparatus for her hypothesis:and what if a young Arab man and a young Arab woman would meet, literallyembodying the words of Guevara and Khattabi, to engage in a conversation aboutstruggle, its means and its purpose?And what if each of them would speak in his/her own language - Moroccan Arabic andIraqi Arabic - and yet fully understand each other?And what if they meet in one of the still oldest colonial possessions in the world - Melilla,in the Moroccan Rif - where Khattaabi lived, was imprisoned, and became arevolutionary?And what if this conversation takes place in a heteropian space - mid- garden, mid- forest -bordered on one side by a Spanish military training camp, on the other by the sea, andfinally by a barrier, isolating the city of the Moroccan territory, and serving for nearlytwenty years to prevent migrants to reach this piece of Europe on the African continent?This poetic hypothesis aims to suggest a reflection on the modes of resonance of history,based on a visual approach articulating documentary and theatrical distancing effect,language and geography, to show ghosts of flesh and blood, determinated to haunt thepresent-time.