Interview: Latifa Echakhch

Photo: Olivier Huitel

It is a cold winter morning when I meet Latifa Echakhch over Zoom for our interview. She is sitting in the late afternoon light of Switzerland, in a room filled with books and various musical instrument. Echakhch was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s highest art award, and has exhibited her works in such spaces as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Fondazione Memmo in Rome and the Tate Modern in London. In 2022, she will represent Switzerland at the 59th Venice Biennale. This interview has been edited for length.

It's nice to see you. Where in Switzerland are you talking from?

Latifa Echakhch: Vevey. I moved here last April and, while I still have my studio, most of the days I am here as I have my kids and things to manage. Most of the time we move a lot, to Zurich or Basel. We have friends everywhere. It is really easy here, Zurich is only two hours away. When it is not a pandemic, we are quite mobile. 

You moved to Switzerland in 2008?

LE: Yes, I started there in 2008 and I really settled in 2012. I was moving all the time, and then in 2012, my first daughter arrived and I had to have somewhere fixed.

And do you find Switzerland is a better a better space for your work?

LE: It was strange in the beginning—when I started to say to friends that I am moving to Switzerland, it was quite a big surprise for them. They said it will be boring, too perfectionist. Some of them also brought up gold money and the second world war, all these things. It's very problematic. But I started to come first in 2007, when a friend tried to make me understand that it could be a place for me. I wanted to find a quiet place to work on my first big show in Grenoble and I was not able to concentrate in Paris.

In Zurich I found a very good vibe, people were working very seriously. And they can also switch off to something more casual and fun very fast. And also the character of the people, the discretion here, that was a good thing for me. I like to be discreet. I like to have people that do not put too much pressure and social attitudes on me. In France, it was a little bit complex and you have social hierarchy and it was a bit difficult for me to survive there.  

And French people are very fun, but not professional. (She laughs warmly) I liked it better in Switzerland. It’s okay if you work a lot, it's okay if you earn money. It's okay if you are broke, everything's okay. The social background of everybody is much more mixed, without any hierarchy, which was really necessary for me, to live in a place like that.

I realized I can work anywhere, because I do not feel like my right place is anywhere. But here I found nature. I grew up near a lake and mountains and that’s exactly what I found here. It's more like my childhood landscape. It’s very familiar to me, and it’s really calmed me down. It’s allowed me to have a very normal life and that’s the thing I like a lot.

Latifa Echahkch: L’air du temps. Photo:  Fabrice Seixas

You are really selling me on Switzerland.

LE: I love it. The first lockdown in March, I felt so lucky to be here. People were social distancing by themselves immediately without any problems, without questioning it, and everybody was working with nature around and with a lot of distance. It was much more calm. When I called my friends in Paris, it was much more hardcore, you had to have your signed paper to go out.

 I know this will sound bizarre, but for me it is also a chance for us to be able to recognize that change is all around—it’s questioning everything in a good way, and I think we will all benefit from that. I know I am privileged in my field as well. There is so much suffering economically, people are really suffering at this point. It’s very long.  

I want to talk about your current projects, but overall your work has been placed in many different spheres, how would you describe what you do?

LE: In the beginning it was little bit strange to have these ideas, and this mechanism of making and installing the work. I didn't understand it very well in the beginning, but it was very deep. And I started to look at it in a different way. Every time I work, it is really like the building of a landscape—and how I can manage a temporality in the nature of the work, and how I can make it visible to the viewer, to the public. It is always an aesthetic approach sure, but there is also a layer of gesture that you can recognize when you are looking closely. It's like if I leave a landscape where something happened, and I have to recompose everything. This is my work.

I KNOW THIS WILL SOUND BIZARRE, BUT FOR ME IT (LOCKDOWN) IS ALSO A CHANCE FOR US TO BE ABLE TO RECOGNIZE THAT CHANGE IS ALL AROUND—IT’S QUESTIONING EVERYTHING IN A GOOD WAY, AND I THINK WE WILL ALL BENEFIT FROM THAT.

It’s true that there are several gestures that are always the same. Like tonality, if I can say that—I have been doing a lot of research into music and I have found many ways of explaining things through music. It’s really the tonality and the cords, it’s the same kind of combination. Even if you change the material, even if you change the size of things, it's always the same score. There are the same complexities for each work.

You often mix the intimate with the political—or at least a pull beyond the personal—why this hybrid?

LE: That was one of the most complex things to go through in my works, learning how to step back from my individual. I am serving art, but I am somebody very discrete and I don’t like to put myself in front of everything.

But it's true that in my life I consider myself an artist, a machine of perception and analysis. I have to trust that sometimes to take some little things from my own memory can be more efficient than to build something completely fictional or abstract. And sometimes it's not things that are super exceptional. It's simple things—simple memories, simple objects. And that's easier to speak through, because they (the public) can also appropriate these simple things for themselves. If I work with a chair with a music instrument on it, people can recognize it and they can appropriate it and make it their own. They are telling their own story on it. So that is a way to give a little of my personal history, but not to put it as an example or to put it as an exceptionality, because it's not that.

And the political—it started as that, take my stuff and take it for you; I give it in that sense. And for some of the works, sometimes the subjects are bigger and then I have to think at a further distance. It is political, but it is also about me.

I have grown up in France since I was three years old, but I do not see myself as a French artist. Now I am in Switzerland. I am Moroccan but I grew up in France. And I really feel that I am Swiss in a way because I am here and I choose the country. It is important, how you can embrace people who are different.

 Latifa Echahkch: L’air du temps. Photo:  Fabrice Seixas

In a previous interview you said that you are “interested in deconstructing cultural stereotypes and reinvesting them with new meaning?” could you explain this further?

LE: Well, that was something that was written about me, but I am an example of the deconstruction of stereotypes. I am Moroccan, but I do not speak Arabic at all. I was not raised in Arabic culture; I feel more French than Moroccan. It’s like I am nowhere in the right position. When I moved when I was a kid in France, I had to learn everything. I had to learn all the traditions. What was French culture? What was Christmas? I felt always like a stranger. And I always have this distance with these cultural things. I don’t feel like I have a (single) culture. I have a culture made with a lot of things, or maybe I have no culture at all? And it is a comfort to be in that position. As long as I can remember I never wanted to embrace one culture 100 percent. Sometimes immigrants, they discover their culture of origin, and then they embrace it, and they are more fervent than the original. I didn’t have that.

I studied Moroccan ornament and books in art school when I was 22 years old, I was late. (She laughs) But I just learned how to make it. I understand the symmetry and I leaned the engraving on plaster. I did embroidery. I was a good student, but it is not part of me, or it is only a little part of me.

WHEN I GOT THE NEWS THAT THE VENICE BIENNALE WAS POSTPONED BY ONE YEAR, I WAS HAPPY. THE ART EXHIBITION AGENDA IS GOING TOO FAST; WE DO NOT HAVE TIME TO REALLY ENTER INTO THE WORK AND MAKE IT AND LIVE WITH IT.

When I was younger, I thought people were lucky to have an identifiable culture. But now when I see my daughters saying ‘this is me, these are my mountains’, I think it is so strange, I would never say something like that. (She laughs again, smiling) But questioning identity is also part of just questioning everything all the time for me, nothing is very static. It was a comfort to myself to be always uncomfortable.

Going back to your description of similar chords, at times your works touches on elements of nature and poetry—cloud shapes, fresco-esque skies, films of water—that you are taking into the gallery space. What does nature mean for you?

LE: They are simple things. They really belong to everybody. A sky is a sky. Water is water. A sunset is a sunset. They belong to everybody. I did this one show at Dvir Gallery in Brussels called Several Times, it was carpet, with things on the carpet, and that was the most intimate thing I have done in all my life. People who know me, know that. The focus was one month in my life. But I try to not make it too precise. People can take it and recognize it, and make it their own story. 

It was immediate memories. It was the first month of my story with my new partner. And I put all these carpets—same size, same pattern—very oriental style but simple. They were very recognizable; at the show everyone was like oh I have one at home that is a little bit bigger or a little smaller. And then I edited maybe five events with material. I am running in the mountains, and therefore there was a water pack for running etc. There were shoes, perfume, cigarettes, a t-shit, some bracelets from a music festival, some compact ash trays. And you had six carpets so it was one memory that was mixing with the other. I love Christopher Nolan so it was like this script, with all the timelines mixed. I did this black paint all over. It was very cinematographic for me. When you have a memory of an event, you can really turn it and change it in your memory very easily. And you can think about the same event with a lot of different details that change. For me, it was really an editing process of a memory.

 Latifa Echakhch: Cross Fade. Photo: Archives Kamel Mennour

How has work during this last year with Covid been for you?

LE: I was working on different projects and some of them were postponed and some were canceled. If I have to confess, it was like I had been dreaming of this type of situation for years. You know, to have a few months off. I am very lucky, so with the cancelations I didn’t want to complain. But when I got the news that the Venice Biennale was postponed by one year, my team was calling me saying ‘damn it’s too bad, we were ready to work immediately for the project’, but me—I was happy. Good, we have one year more to work. Even if the project was built and done, to have one year more means we can read more and do more research, and we can commission more text for the catalogue.

And also, you can live with the project, because the art exhibition agenda is going too fast; we do not have time to really enter into the work and make it and live with it. All of that was very fast from my point of view. To be able to work in the project for two years instead of one, I thought—that is luxury.

But I also have two kids at home, an eight-year-old and a three-year-old, so it is never boring at home.

And you also have some kittens as well?

LE: (She laughs) Yes. My partner had two cats and I had two cats, and then we lost one and then there were fights between my other one and my partners’ when they moved in. So, my other one is now the cat of the arts residency program nearby, directed by my partner. He is like a little mascot cat. But my daughters recently asked for a kitten. So, I took two kittens. They are four months old and they are super cute. It’s a good atmosphere at home now.

I love cats. It’s a good presence. And it has allowed us to see things in their way. Sometimes I start to imagine what they see and how they feel. This colour, this contrast, this light, maybe that is capturing their attention? Or the frequency of music, they are quite sensitive to that. If you can change just a little bit your point of view, you can feel different things. Like, if you only think about vibration, light, contrast, or another time, if you think only of smell and wind—it changes. I use them to have another way of observing.