Lina Ben Rejeb Nous vivons trop près des machines

La Boîte I October 2019 La Boîte Hors Tunis I ISAM Gabès I March 2020

Text of Lina Ben Rejeb.

Together is an important word.
It’s a question of creating a link by making an image of the trace, of putting people at the heart of the project: involving others in the process of making and building. Here, the trace is revisited, displaced and recomposed.
Having long considered the finiteness of a gesture (tracing), of a tool (the copier), this exhibition is about displacement: our routines today, like those visible in the exhibition We live too close to machines (digging, duplicating, applying, washing, repeating and superimposing) are perhaps already ruins.
Seeing into the past, recounting these men around a long table struggling to make a trace, and telling the story of this long white cloth that gradually becomes the bearer of imprints, signs, the memory of gestures: palimpsest.
This trade, that of the sari printer, is tending to disappear. Like so many others, it is becoming exhausted as machines replace men. Relocating the practice is an attempt to question these routines in a different way, to ward off the fear of a distorted world.
Barely enough time to get to grips with a task before it has already been consigned to oblivion. Obsolete, like our machines, our practices are constantly being renewed.
First of all, there are those who produced these traces: the workers in India, and those who compose them, the people at La Boite. Between the two, there is a profession: that of the artist, who seeks to question the very notion of work in an age of obsolescence, globalisation and delocalisation.
The idea is to show a journey, the construction of a medium that becomes a work of art (producing a wooden stamp, revealing a fabric) to reflect together on the notion of craft, that of work and our imprint, what we become once the craft (or function) has disappeared. It’s a central issue in an age of obsolescence, when we’re forced to take a nostalgic look at what continues to be, to exist differently.
Lina Ben Rejeb, 2019.

> Biographie