Latifa Echakhch

Der Allplatz, 2023

Latifa Echakhch's project has a special character, since it involves an exploded concert stage that will be used for many of the events scheduled during the Biennale. The artist has conceived her project as a continuation of what she experimented with at the Venice Biennale in 2022. In a Swiss Pavilion as if clothed in embers and ashes, she had scattered slightly charred wooden figures, survivors of a mysterious ritual, perhaps that Concert which gave its name to the installation, modulated with composer Alexandre Babel, without any sound, but with an incitement to listen to reality.

Latifa Echakhch pursued the idea of an unstructured stage, allowing a different relationship between musicians and audience alike: an approach more in tune with contemporary musical experimentation where hierarchies are called into question. She had the opportunity to bring such a set-up to life for the first time at Messeplatz during Art Basel. In collaboration with Luc Meier, Der Allplatz welcomed musicians each day on modules redistributed according to the spirit of their concert. The same tubular structures used to support the stage and technical equipment were improvised as benches for the audience.

With this experience behind him, the artist has completed his concept for Chandoline, which offers a rare fluidity to accommodate the proposals of unconventional artists.

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Latifa Echakhch

Born in 1964 in Morocco

Lives and works in Vevey

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Born in the Moroccan countryside, Latifa Echakhch grew up in Savoie from the age of 3. She entered the Beaux-Arts de Grenoble almost by chance, and went on to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy and the Beaux-Arts de Lyon.

In 2002, when she began exhibiting, she readily admitted that the political climate in France - the National Front in the second round of the presidential elections - and internationally - the second Intifada - demanded a real artistic commitment that would never leave her. However, her art never militates, except for art itself, for its capacity to awaken consciousness, no doubt, but also the senses.

In 2011, she made her first appearance at the Venice Biennale. At the invitation of Bice Curiger, curator of the main exhibition, she exhibited flagpoles without flags in the Giardini under the name Fantasia. An echo of the debates on the place of national politics in artistic expression, and also of the multiple identities, each undefined, that were shaping the young artist, then in the process of settling in Valais and starting a family there.

In 2022, she will occupy the Biennale's Swiss Pavilion with Le Concert, an installation that examines what it's like to experience the end of music. A work imbued with melancholy, as was Goodby Horses, ten years earlier at the Kunsthaus Zurich, where visitors haunted an abandoned circus. In recent years, while time and its cycles have always been essential to her artistic research, Latifa Echakhch has chosen to take a step aside, drawing on the world of music to raise new questions that illuminate and enrich her career as a visual artist. Le Concert, like her work for the Son Biennale, is a case in point.