Collage, Photomontage on paper, 65 x 50 cm, 1968–72
Extracts from an interview with Nja Mahdaoui by Barbara Arnhold, Cologne, June 1993, originally published as “Les collages de Nja Mahdaoui” in Calligraphies. Hommage à Nja Mahdaoui, monographic issue of Horizons Maghrébins & Cahier d'Études Maghrébines (Toulouse & Cologne, 1998), pp. 206–07.
Nja Mahdaoui: Jafr - The Alchemy of Signs, (Milan: Skira, 2015), pp. 27-28.
Barbara Arnhold. Nja Mahdaoui, I’d like to talk to you about a particular facet of your work, namely the collages, which could be described as surrealistic with their disturbing shapes and faces. This is very different from your calligraphic work.
Nja Mahdaoui. This technique of photomontage collage is well known to many artists of Scandinavia and South America. I’ve been working in this field aesthetically for a long time now and can say that it’s like writing for me. It has enabled me to eliminate what could have blocked me in painting. In my concern with knowing Western art, there is the omnipresence of the image. I learned this at school. When I became aware of the work on signs, I had to imagine this technique only as something marginal with respect to my primary work, the work on signs and the letter. I liked the way of working on collages and it became a sort of diary into which I poured everything that could have been superfluous, especially during the period when I lived in the West, from Rome to Paris. I put everything that occurs to me into it, but freely, as in surreal memory. It is the visual fabric between posters in the street, cinema, television, reading, everything that crosses and collides in memory and can obstruct a work of art. A painter who has all that in his memory, especially when moving from one continent to another, is in fact in danger of mixing everything up and letting himself be overly influenced by this expression borrowed from the Western style, of which I like a lot of things, of course.
Nja Mahdaoui. This technique of photomontage collage is well known to many artists of Scandinavia and South America. I’ve been working in this field aesthetically for a long time now and can say that it’s like writing for me. It has enabled me to eliminate what could have blocked me in painting. In my concern with knowing Western art, there is the omnipresence of the image. I learned this at school. When I became aware of the work on signs, I had to imagine this technique only as something marginal with respect to my primary work, the work on signs and the letter. I liked the way of working on collages and it became a sort of diary into which I poured everything that could have been superfluous, especially during the period when I lived in the West, from Rome to Paris. I put everything that occurs to me into it, but freely, as in surreal memory. It is the visual fabric between posters in the street, cinema, television, reading, everything that crosses and collides in memory and can obstruct a work of art. A painter who has all that in his memory, especially when moving from one continent to another, is in fact in danger of mixing everything up and letting himself be overly influenced by this expression borrowed from the Western style, of which I like a lot of things, of course.
BA. Is this your way of addressing the multiple and sometimes very aggressive
image of the West, which perhaps overwhelmed you sometimes?
NM. All that has to be reconciled. When you go to the Pinakothek in Munich, the Louvre or the British Museum, you are tempted, in the learning and reading of art, to like certain things that you carry inside you even though they do not belong to your culture. Outside the museums there are books, streets and posters: a reading of a given society. If I am in Paris, New York or Chicago, there is a reading that is not addressed to me in particular. However, when you are transported into another geography by the journey, if you come from North Africa, the posters in the street… you have to learn how to look at them and eliminate the aggressiveness of certain gestures. It is to me, a North African and Mediterranean, that they appear aggressive, whereas in the host society they are banal and talk about milk or chocolate.
image of the West, which perhaps overwhelmed you sometimes?
NM. All that has to be reconciled. When you go to the Pinakothek in Munich, the Louvre or the British Museum, you are tempted, in the learning and reading of art, to like certain things that you carry inside you even though they do not belong to your culture. Outside the museums there are books, streets and posters: a reading of a given society. If I am in Paris, New York or Chicago, there is a reading that is not addressed to me in particular. However, when you are transported into another geography by the journey, if you come from North Africa, the posters in the street… you have to learn how to look at them and eliminate the aggressiveness of certain gestures. It is to me, a North African and Mediterranean, that they appear aggressive, whereas in the host society they are banal and talk about milk or chocolate.
BA. These collages are your way of assimilating the images of another world. You take a bit here, a bit there, and make an assemblage that belongs to you alone. Can you specify the expression that emerges from these collages? I see
very distressing things there.
NM. Imagine making mythological figures speak with my Mediterranean vision. If you took two or three mythological figures from three different places and gave them the gift of speech, what would they say? For me, these collages are reports drawn from life. It is as if I had taken snapshots myself. I have never made a collage at random. I have spent days and days choosing such a look, such a detail, a part of the human body or a landscape, and I have engaged them in dialogue regardless of their time and of the wishes of the creator at the beginning. When I take a work by Mantegna (the Lamentation over the Dead Christ) and develop it in my own way with two stills from a film by Pasolini, it is as though I were writing a novel with my knowledge of cultures. This technique has enabled me to speak in my way in an assemblage that obeys laws: the laws of freedom and its surreal faculties and the laws of the imagination.
very distressing things there.
NM. Imagine making mythological figures speak with my Mediterranean vision. If you took two or three mythological figures from three different places and gave them the gift of speech, what would they say? For me, these collages are reports drawn from life. It is as if I had taken snapshots myself. I have never made a collage at random. I have spent days and days choosing such a look, such a detail, a part of the human body or a landscape, and I have engaged them in dialogue regardless of their time and of the wishes of the creator at the beginning. When I take a work by Mantegna (the Lamentation over the Dead Christ) and develop it in my own way with two stills from a film by Pasolini, it is as though I were writing a novel with my knowledge of cultures. This technique has enabled me to speak in my way in an assemblage that obeys laws: the laws of freedom and its surreal faculties and the laws of the imagination.
BA. There is a link between The Thousand and One Nights and the collages.
NM. I always had this idea of collages on the Nights, which makes possible all the fantasies and all the comforts in complete freedom, and always reminds man of life and death. The beauty of the surrealism in The Thousand and One Nights always evokes ephemerality, and the drop of blood is omnipresent. We are faced with questions about the beauty of life and its fleetingness, the extent to which a woman can engage in a dialogue with a fish, a tree, and so on.