Now 33 years old, visual artist Haythem Zakaria grew up in the north east of Tunis in a town called La Marsa. “It is a very beautiful town with a privileged cultural environment compared to the country but also other Tunisian towns.”. When he was 15 he already had an interest in some kind of creative outlet, which saw him playing guitar in a rock band. Later he began studies in audio-visual film making. I interviewed Haythem about his multifaceted art practice and why he refers to himself as a “Plastic artist”.
Tell our readers about how you figured out that you wanted to be an artist, specifically a digital artist?
Actually, I wasn’t particularly aiming to become a digital artist at first. I was very interested in filmmaking and cinema but I was quickly disenchanted with the reality and slowness of the cinematographic economic model especially by its relation with the creative and artistic aspect. Thus, I started looking into other ways of more autonomous creations. I was also driven by a strong desire to work using pictures and more experimental writings, more spiritual maybe. Digital tools allowed me to build my artistic universe.
Tell our readers about how your move from Tunisia to France has influenced your approach to your work, if at all?
When I decided to follow the digital path, I started feeling more and isolated. I spent a lot of time on internet forums specialized in the creation tools I’ve been using at that time. My frustration also started to increase proportionately. In my local environment, I did not have the possibility to exchange with colleagues or at least these exchanges were rather rare.
My fields of interests gave the status of an outsider unwillingly. This is why I made it so that my end-of –studies internship I was supposed to have during my academic training would take place in France, specifically Paris. It was the French artist YroYto who opened the doors of his structure “Les Pixels Transversaux”. It was located in a place called “La Générale en Manufacture” which no longer exists, and which served as artists’ workshops, residency places and headquarters for different associations.
I arrived there at 25 years old and it was my first experience outside my homeland. This place presented me with the opportunity to meet other artists from different nationalities, to exchange with them and to learn. I would say that for me Paris, through its dynamism and international outreach, is an open window on the world which keeps on inspiring me.
All this synergy and my multiple experiences in France allowed me to better structure my intellectual and technical skills, thus in a certain measure to professionalize my work.
How do you like to describe your work?
This is a recurrent a question but hard to answer to because both our work and our personality are in a constant evolution and redefinition. I would like to start by saying that I do not consider myself as a digital artist. I prefer to define myself as a “Plastic artist” even though the terminology does not really exist in English. Generally, we’d rather talk about visual artist despite the fact that these terms are totally opposites. A “Plastic artist” is a multidisciplinary artist who will “reshape” different tangible or intangible materials. Therefore, my work takes multiple forms – performance, installation, video, photography, drawings, sculpture, intervention, etc. I try to systematically interlock different layers of reading levels. The one is esoteric and the other is exoteric. Some of these layers will unveil only to those who will make a genuine effort to access the work. From this perspective I would rather talk about participant rather than spectator. Another important dimension of my work is the necessity and obsession of equilibrium and complementary connections between the aesthetic experience and the conceptual dimension of the work.
How has your work evolved over time? How do you describe your creative process?
In a way, I’ve nurtured and developed a severe critic towards my usage of digital tools. Which lead me to a formal rupture point since 2013 in the tools I’ve been using and the way I used them.
While keeping and developing a particular thinking and reflection of the digital, I’ve started to fear being conditioned by the very tools I’ve been using in my creation. Computer programming, rapid prototyping board, sensors, etc partly determines the work, and I refused this. This is how I started to develop lowtech/no tech works. There was a true will to free my artistic practice and my conceptual approach.
As far as my creative process is concerned, it revolves around my hyper instinctive approach. I often have a vision in the form of a flash of what I must do and then there is an entire process to try to get closer to the initial vision. I really feel the impression of sensing a reminiscence which I tempt to materialize into a work of art. It is only at a later phase that I rethink what I’ve accomplished and apprehend it from an intellectual perspective.
What are the themes you like to work through?
I like to intersect and question systems which at first sight seems completely different but converges and interconnect in an “infra-thin” way.
In a way, I am looking for a recurrent matrix primary schema. This schema would be at the origins of all these visible reminiscences as much in the techne and the logos.
Tell our readers more about Sufi spirituality, which has a strong presence in your work.
Sufism is a mystical path in Islam. This path can be schematized as trip from the circumference of a circle towards its centre. It’s the visual and diagrammatic aspect present in the writings of Ibn Arabi, one of the most important thinkers of this mystic as well as the universal dimension of its precepts which immediately seduced.
Do you feel exploring Sufi spirituality through digital art techniques and mediums offers a new avenue for exploring spirituality? Or exploring what the digital offers? Or both?
Undoubtedly both. Digital with its various tools explore and nourish mystical ways and inversely. However, I would like to stress a point which I find very important. I don’t think that digital thinking is something recent. For example, the notion of algorithm can be traced back to antiquity. Myth and antique greek theatre played the same role as the actual innovative medias. I can keep on naming other examples. This relationship between digital and spiritual (in a larger and none particularly specific to Sufism manner) gets complicated, I would say, when we examine the question in depth. From different aspect we find computational process in a lot of mystic, thus, once again very digital. A microchip or an electronic circuit resembles talismans in its functional aspect. Everything is fundamentally linked. The comprehensiveness of the relationship becomes obvious from the moment we decide to analyze it further.
There is often a conflation of the terms ‘Black’, ‘African’ and ‘Afro’. How do you view these identifying terms, specifically in relation to art? What are some of the recent conversations around these terms? How do you like to describe your own work when thinking about these terms?
At first, these three terms reminds me of the Black Arts Movement of the sixties in the United States. It also makes me think of the metaphor by sociologist W.E.B Du Bois: “the problem of the 20th century is a problem of the colour line” referring to racial segregation which is still ongoing since then.
There is an actual interest and popularity from the occident for contemporary African Art. For instance in France, we can list an important number of fares and exhibitions which took place in the last recent years. Rare are the events and the programs that do not form amalgams and do not confuse everything.
Unfortunately, there is a persistent cliché which consists in thinking that the generic term (which is completely senseless) African Contemporary Art could signify something, but worse that it contributes to sustain in the audience’s mind that there is only one African Artistic Scene.
Of course at this level, the terms “Black”, “African” and “Afro” support the clichés of exotic expectations of this very audience and how it conceives the African artist.
Recently, I visited the exhibition Afrique Capitales of curator Simon Njami and I found it very rich and diverse, which is the image of and in accordance with the multiple artistic creations coming from the African continent. Simon Njami is cautious when it comes to this question and doesn’t hesitate to be critical towards these actual tendencies and these intellectual short cuts regarding the African scene and the way it is perceived by the European continent, particularly France.
Il y’a un rapport important et sincère dans ma création artistique au continent Africain qui ne se dévoile pas forcément aisément. Il faut pour cela voir l’ensemble de mes différents travaux et chercher le liant.
I have a strong desire to unveil the universal and to trace back to the sources, to the Khôra* but always through the means of a cultural singularity.
As a Tunisian, I claim to be part of a multi-cultural background and even more being an African. Many times, I have been told that my work wasn’t very “Tunisian”, or not very “African”. In our present times, we tend to normalize and rationalize things, artists and their work. Nuances and variations are not really accepted because they are complicated to classify, thus to apprehend.
To some extent, it has affected me in a negative way in the art field.
Even if I claim an intellectual coherence in my methodology as an artist, I don’t want to carry labels nor stay in a comfort zone.
Digital art from various African artists has been associated with Afrocentrism. What is your opinion on this? What are some of the other terms that you feel offer an understanding of art from the continent outside of this framework?
Of course, there are multiple aspects to the question of Afrocentrism. The romantic dimension and the deconstructivist prism of this ideology as well as the fantasy repossession or not by some artists is very interesting. Clearly, it is a poetical stand and a form of artistic activism.
As it is the case for every serious artistic approach assuming a political or even hyper political posture, it is normal to see debate or dialogue around the works of these artists.The real question is to know in what conditions this debate will take place and in what comprehensive or incomprehensive proportions it will occur.
We have to question the role of the artist within our actual society. His speech and the vision that he is carrying is not always soft or in accordance with the majority. He must not be afraid of being on the margins. The notion that immediately comes to my mind is “Afrotopia” of the author Felwine Sarr.
There has been a lot of discussion around the difficulties in displaying and selling digital art within traditional gallery spaces. What are some of the conversations you are involved in or have experienced in relation to these difficulties? What are some of the attempts to re-think traditional art display and selling that you think could be built on for solutions?
Exhibiting and selling digital art work is a very prominent question. The issue of continuity is strongly bound to it. Paradoxically I think the major problem is not technical but rather intellectual. If the artist has the opportunity to collaborate with an open-minded gallerist, it is always possible to find an economic model that is coherent with his work despite technical and logistical complexity. For this, the artist must make some concession while staying in ethical and intellectual sincerity.
As far as I am concerned and in my personal practice, I favour the project to everything else, even to the detriment of financial aspect. Without falling into victimization but I think that many artists go through a long period of financial precariousness subjacent to their choices for qualitative and artistic intransigence.
The temporality of the art market and its extreme codification makes the artists path very hard and complex. There are of course exceptions and some quick ascent but it is not my case nor my rhythm. As I previously mentioned, I use different mediums depending on the project, thus, some of my works are more classic (drawings, photos, video, etc.). After a while, I understood that a few gallerists really take risks with a young artist but wait until he gets labelled.
Being in France, I notice important mutations, notably, in the role of art gallery and their perimeter. The entire landscape is being perturbed by the fairs, selling houses but also more and more by the website specialized in selling work of art online.
The tendency is towards privatization, thus foundations are the new tenors of the market. My point is that there will be fewer places to classical galleries which will not adapt and reinvent themselves, anyway.
Tell our readers about your solo show “Ruthmos”.
“Ruthmos” is my first solo show exhibited at the Tunisian art gallery Aicha Gorgi. The project is based on famous article by linguist Emile Benveniste on the semantic origins of the word rhythm. The hypothesis of Arafat Sadallah who is a curator and philosopher is founded on the rapprochement between the greek root Ruthmos and the arab word r.s.m which means “drawing”.
An important part of the solo show is made of drawings named “dessins au métronome”. Thus, I developed 3 work protocols based on metronome [a device used by musicians that produces a sound at particular intervals] and the goal was to experience the rhythm differently. The drawings were taking form in a generative and performative way and the whole created an aesthetic experience. On other drawings I used a stamp pad to get close to the invocation mystical mechanism. The arab word that was stamped was “howa” which means God in the Sufi glossary.
By constantly repeating it I ended up abstracting the verb which was transforming and transmuted.
In the about page on your website you mention the project Alif. Is this project of particular importance to you? Could you tell our readers about the project?
The Alif project is my first series of drawing. I would like to emphasize the fact that I do not consider myself as a drawing artist and I think I wasn’t really interested in learning how to draw in an academic way. It is more an issue of interfacing Man/Tools/Surface drawing which interested me in the first hand.
The Alif series served as a base to the Poétique de l’éther series. I started experimenting the transcoding system of Arabic letters in the perspective of make them universal and normalize them. Abstract in appearance, these drawings are in fact some sort of anti-calligraphy that deals with an esoteric science which the hidden science of Arab letters.
It is very Kabalistic science in its basis which is part of digital thinking. The whole is, once again, performative because it is executed with a tubular ink stiff pen and any error would have been fatal. It would have meant starting the whole ten hour process from the beginning.
Self Portrait #1 is also particularly interesting. Tell our readers about the decision to make a portrait that is a moving diagram.
S.P #1 is a self-portrait and is a bit special. I realized it when I was 29 and the video lasts 29 minutes (It is absolutely no coincidence…). I was interested in a particular scale relation, that of the infra-thin. The stroboscopic diagram we perceive and my fantasy vision of a synaptic zone with electric exchanges between two neurons. I have the hope to reproduce a self-portrait with more precise neurological instruments in collaboration with specialists.
What are you working on at the moment?
Since the beginning of this year I have been working on a new two series work. The project is named “Interstices” and the two series are named “Opus I” and “Opus II”. Both are made of a video piece and a series of photos digitally enhanced. “Interstices refers to the spatial interval but also temporal and rhythmic interval in the between”.
The project comes in direct continuity with the series “Dessins au metronome” conducted throughout 2016 but also follows the researches undertaken on the photographic series “Anamnesis”. Departing from landscape shootings underlying geometries unveil periodically. The landscape is holistically questioned through the prism of audiovisual apparatus in order to unveil a hidden and metric order. I have been able to tackle the Tunisian desert and the north eastern seaside. “Opus III” will focus on mountain landscape. I aspire to realize an experimental film (certainly, somewhere between metaphysic and science fiction) to conclude or begin this Opus cycle.
