$14,000

Artwork Description

| About the work At the time the Jerada mine was set up under the French protectorate, the only thing on the horizon was the mirage of a bright industrial future conducive to development. We were not yet aware of the fateful ecological danger of such an activity. But today, former miners are well aware of the damage that their only livelihood has done to the environment, and are even campaigning for a genuine energy transition. At the time when the Jerada mine was being set up, under the French protectorate, the only thing he could see on the horizon was the The beauty of Mouhcine Rahaoui's work is a sublime incarnation of the harmful repercussions of the extractive industry on the social fabric the health of workers and the environment. His work, at once transcendent and rooted in the reality of his fellow citizens' difficult daily lives, is proof that human misery is not inevitable. The anthracite that glitters in the darkness of the earth eventually becomes a radiant diamond. The artist presents dark images of her nocturnal hauntings and abysmal distress, but also those of the optimism that drives her and motivates her artistic work. While Jerada has become an abyss of distress for its inhabitants, its skies are strewn with the invincible hope of its children. By aesthetising the misery of the miners, he makes their fate sublimely visible. In the series entitled ‘Solidaires’, the white of the candles fixed to the plastic surface in straight lines is stained with coal. This is an allusion to the miners who, before sunrise, mechanically prepare to go down into the bowels of the earth. | About the artist Son of a miner, Mouhcine Rahaoui is inhabited by the gestures and materials he has seen such as coal, wax and candles. He explores the aeasthetics of underground galleries to invent a visual lexicon that could be compared to the Arte Povera movement. A way for him to formulate the experiences and stories of the miners. "His land is above all a collection of memories, made up of familiar faces, social practices, work uniforms and labour. Like many others in Jerada, he feels like a stranger in his own home since the slow agony of the complex. Mouhcine Rahaoui takes on the role of storyteller to reveal a reality experienced from his pulpit, speaking "in the name of his people" as a tribute to all the anonymous people who have had the mine as their only reference point, and around which life and death still revolve in Jerada. The mine is everywhere in his artistic universe in works that are as powerful as they are moving. Mouhcine's works are conceived in a form of symbolic confrontation with the industrial complex and its shafts. For him, there is no authenticity without radicalism, because his art is close to the miners and their daily gestures. His artistic lexicon summons mythology and the words of the workers to freeze in wax their traces and their labours.