In the latest issue of AnOther Magazine, New York-based artist Meriem Bennani talks about the catharsis of singing in football stadiums
This article is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“I watch videos of the Raja Casablanca fans, the Ultras, singing at football games on YouTube – they’re hypnotic. First there’s the soundtrack of thousands of voices together. Then there are coloured flares, giant flags – imagine a flag that’s the size of a building. One time it was of Daisy Duck. And they’re songs that would normally never fly – about government corruption or Palestine. These moments allow for an expression of political truth that would be dangerous on an individual basis – there’s this protection of the collective because you can’t arrest 300,000 people.
“It amazes me, the extent to which the fans go to create a spectacle in between moments of sports – it’s such a cathartic space. And everyone knows what they’re supposed to do without talking about it, it’s a moment of symbiosis. I’m always interested in how politics feel in your body. When I watch these videos, they feel like moments of utopia – everything that we’re starved of.
“I’m drawn to the tensions between something that seems cute and small but that can multiply or even become violent and make the ground shake – make a political vibration. How something can go from funny to serious. Like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character – he’s so loving and cute and he loves to eat, but then he becomes this tornado, a terrifying abstraction of lines. You always need a tension – you have to create an energy, even with making one image, for it to do something, to transcend itself.”
A lizard lies on a bed in her Brooklyn apartment watching a tiger sexy-dancing on her laptop. She turns to a news piece where Dr Anthony Fauci, depicted as a pixelated snake, reports on the early course of the Covid-19 virus. This is just one scene from 2 Lizards, a languid, funny and emotive animated film by the New York-based Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani and Israeli artist Orian Barki. With its eerily familiar dialogue, the film proliferated online episodically in the spring of 2020, and by September 2022 was on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art – though Bennani had already exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Opening this Halloween at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Bennani’s show For My Best Family will take over two floors of the Podium building. On the upper floor, another collaboration with Barki – this time led by Bouchra, a 35-year-old leather jacket-wearing North African jackal making a film about coming out to her mother. On the ground floor, a kinetic sculptural installation of 300 flip-flops beating rhythmically in a call-and-response pattern – the banal objects evoking the power and catharsis of the crowd.
