Grandfather, can I grasp your face?
30 July 2023 - 30 July 2023
Grandfather, can I grasp your face?
Grandfather, can I grasp your face? is a multi sensorial installation including drawings, an audiovisual piece, plants, and a tea bar.
Through this installation, Bochra Tabboubi creates a poetic reconstitution of her native Thibar, based on encounters with people, myths, the area’s fauna and flora and memories evoked during her field research. The place is charged with emotions linked to her grandparents and the land, which she attempts to make tangible through her work.
One of the driving inspirations behind her research is the secret recipe of Thibarine. Her grandfather spent a great deal of his life in the vineyards of the region, working for Domaine St. Joseph. This land was cultivated with grapes by “Les Pères Blancs”, a group of Christian missionaries who settled in the region in the early 1900s. Questions around the origins of this beverage as well as its ingredients drove her to start conversations with inhabitants of the region. The narratives that emerged through these encounters took her far beyond the subject of Thibarine and into the realms of the mythological, personal and historical.
Based on these narratives, Bochra created a series of drawings and an audiovisual piece through which she reimagines Thibar’s present landscape. Through the process of her research and creation, Bochra opens up channels to her ancestors, as well as space for speculation and engagement with the supernatural.
Her drawings can be seen as the translation of raw emotion into color and form.
The use of color, a new element within Bochra’s work, allowed the artist to imagine a palette for Thibar - mostly vibrant shades of green, red, and purple.
Instead of giving into nostalgia, Bochra was interested in focussing on “what is left”, the ruins, the vegetation, the people, the stories, and how these all connect. It is in these connections that the artist found her embeddedness within the landscape.