Blue Notes brings together for the first time in Morocco, a selection of Muhcine Ennou’s photographs from the series Sometimes Here, Sometimes There (2016-2019). The exhibition at L’Uzine is the first part of a double presentation articulated between Morocco and the Netherlands. For the past three years, the photographer has made a dense photographic corpus between these two countries. He deals with the way in which the photographs recalled or imagined, find their origin in journeys that may be exploited, rectified or enriched. It therefore becomes difficult to state the precise criteria that guide these choices. This displacement leads to a loss of landmarks and a desire to find a sense of belonging, of home. As visible images, we can easily rely on the sensitivity or imagination of the photographer’s gaze and by extension, in the gaze of the spectator.
Muhcine Ennou stages the impalpable. In addition, he does not allude to an anchorage in precise and intelligible places or temporalities. A rigorous and exact chronology is not necessary in order to follow better, the narrative patterns that intersect in his photographs depicting different scenes and motifs. The only lexical link is elaborated in a free and improvised way between several places that each have a history connected in filigree to the subjectivity of the photographer. The twenty-two photographs of the exhibition announce several landscapes, scenes and narrative fragments: alternating between wakefulness and heavy sleep, gust of wind that fixes the gaze, moments where flat and desolate extents alternate. Spaces open the way to a fragmented unit characterizing these images. The simple treatment of light and color reflect a series thought out like the transcription of states of the soul, feelings, fragments of situations lived and crossed between the Netherlands and Morocco. This consistency is also reflected in the systematic use of the same photographic format and reproduction technique, which reinforce a glimpse of déjà vu, familiarity. One observation that leads to another: one notices the density and saturation of the colors. They reveal the richness and variety of visual writing and the rapidity with which he photographs and fixes the represented moments. Thus, the exhibition highlights the main issue of transposition which becomes a poetic question.
This same mode of interaction was adopted by Ornette Coleman and the Master Musicians of Jajouka, in an improvised compositional approach. In 1973, Coleman embarked on a musical pilgrimage to the village of Jajouka in the Rif to play and record with the musicians. This trip was part of the 1973-1975 period, which marked an important transformation in the career of the American musician. It follows on from his pioneering work of improvisation and composition as one of the founders of the avant-garde jazz movement. This experience will profoundly affect his aesthetic and musical conceptions. At that time, he formulated his harmolodic ideas for composition and improvisation, his musical and theoretical system that encompassed multiple musical experiences, as well as broken stylistic and geographical boundaries. The recording of “Midnight Sunrise” with the musicians was included in the LP Dancing In Your Head (1973), Coleman using his harmolodic system to establish a mutual interaction between a jazz context and Jajouka’s traditional style. He said: You’ve got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it’s all played by the same notes. So we create our own words with music and images.
This quote from Coleman, which opens the exhibition by Muhcine Ennou, accompanies in this context the photographs of a sentence that transmits multiple knowledge and vanishing points. It brings Ennou's photographs into a discontinuous narrative and temporal framework, an elliptical narrative that remains timeless by the widespread use of the present. However, his photographs and Coleman's words clearly comprise two frames that offer a linear reading while directing the perception and interpretation of the blue color in the exhibition space, the color thus becoming the translation of what one feels. The first, inducing a search for freedom in improvisation, makes the photographs the fleeting visions of transcribed compositions and interpretations of a melodic language. The second highlights a reflection on color, belonging through feelings and dissipation, through the way man is confronted with its experience, and by the photographer giving himself a vain task, filled with dispersion. The exhibition seeks to reveal the impact of these stories on the viewer, through the experience of the color blue that envelops the photographs. This coming together in a sequel, of images made at different dates and connected by the blue evoking Coleman, reminds us that the narrative allows to follow a linear pattern while reserving the right to derogate from it. In this context, it can be said that Coleman spent his life trying to give a musical form to the next day. The rhythm becomes a language that connects music, politics and human relations.
Muhcine Ennou uses silence to express absence: the silent place of all clarity can be seen in the scenes represented in the photographic series Sometimes here, Sometimes there at the same time as to the visual sensations they invoke. This translation takes place by the choice of easily recognizable visual sequences, but never as a whole. The photographer’s journey between the Netherlands and Morocco is put in jeopardy by the intermittent exercise of transposition: we are faced with an aesthetic cut-off supported by an exploded narrative. The structure of this corpus is therefore disseminated and the images have shifted its order and meaning. The vagueness which the exhibition invites us to experience is anchored in a disturbed structure. The exhibition sets a rhythm to the narrative that invites us to experience a musical poem in prose, similar to the creation of new imaginary and intermediate spaces to which Coleman refers. Muhcine Ennou makes the image permeable to the needs of everyday life, his photographs, free of any teaching, do not transmit a message or symbol decipherable, interpretable, utilitarian, moralized. In other words, we go to the other side, and we are now in the picture. By openly or tacitly subscribing to the image, the exhibition Blue Notes distorts its structure and encourages drift.
Karima Boudou, curator of the exhibition