Faouzi Laatiris

Biography

Imilchil, where Faouzi Laatiris was born in 1958, lies in the mountains of Morocco. Today he lives and works in two cities in the north of the country, Tétouan and Martil.

He studied at the National Institute of Fine Arts (diploma in 1983), then in France, at the École des beaux-arts in Bourges, where he took a diploma in 1989. On his return he became a teacher at the Tétouan institute. In 1993 he founded the workshop “Volume and Installation” there. From that point his own practice and his teaching are hard to separate: so he himself and his colleagues at the institute describe it. Among those who studied with him or alongside him are named Safâa Erruas, Batoul S’Himi, Younès Rahmoun, Mohssin Harraki and Mustapha Akrim, often grouped together as the “Tétouan generation”. The 2016 exhibition at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, “Fugitive Volumes”, was built around his work and that of artists linked with the same institute.

Since the 1990s Laatiris has worked at the crossing of sculpture, installation, performance and public space. His subjects include the urban building site, the economies of the global South in the age of globalisation, the relation between form and function, industrial production and improvised makeshift ingenuity (the French call it “système D”), and the poetics of ruin. He describes his pieces as works “on the edge of cultural schizophrenia”. To my mind this phrase suits his installations best, where everyday objects change context and cease to be what they were.

One of his best-known works is “The Seven Doors”. It refers to the gates of the old medina of Tétouan and is assembled from objects connected with music, pottery and herbs. The viewer walks among them, and the composition is read through that movement. The project was shown in Rabat in 2016. In public space he is known for “Obelisk of the South” in Douala (Cameroon) and “The Suspended Dome” at Fès–Saïss International Airport.

In 1999 Laatiris took part in the group exhibition “L’Objet désorienté au Maroc” at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, organised by Jean-Louis Froment. It is regarded as an important episode in the history of contemporary Mediterranean art. Exhibitions then followed around the world: the Dakar Biennale (2002), doual’art in Douala (2006), the Fatma Jellal gallery in Casablanca (2009), the Marrakech Biennale (2009) and the Istanbul Biennale (2011), and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (2012). In 2010 his work was shown at Darat al Funun in Amman. In 2014 came the Arab World Institute in Paris and the MuCEM in Marseille. In 2015 he showed again at the Arab World Institute, in the exhibition “Contemporary Morocco”. In 2016 his exhibition “Installations on the Edge of Cultural Schizophrenia” was held in Rabat. In 2021 his work was shown at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, as part of the project “Moroccan Trilogy: 1950–2020”.