Blame Us - لومونا
25 min, Athens, Greece, 20265-channel video installation, color, sound, loop
© Stathis Mamalakis
Exhibition text
Eva Vaslamatzi - Curator
They blame us. Let them blame us. It’s comforting.
Often things begin long before - so long before that we can no longer trace the root of their origin. And those who were there know it; they experienced it, or they know those who did but never spoke about it, or they just said a few words. Maybe they didn’t even hear those words, but they carry it and feel it, it speaks to them across generations, it brings them certain, unpredictable tears. Not out of weakness. It is not a story about weakness, but one about the path weakness follows to grow into strength. About what else might be defined as strength.
It is a story narrated through the body. It does not fall silent. In its effortlessness, it seems to slip away, to be out of control - yet it is predetermined. The more you look at it, at different moments in time, moving in a circular way around it, the more you understand that it will not surprise you. You look at the story and at the bodies that narrate it without sound and without expectations for the next move. You just absorb it.
This story flows into Nabil Aniss’s work through participating bodies, drawing on his own lived experience within the ritual tradition of Jedba. From then until today, much and little have changed (this is possible). Many gazes, mostly external, found in French archives shape the image we have of something that was happening and continues to happen. For the artist, this legacy/burden is already more than enough. The possibilities offered by the camera become tools to direct the gaze, to project the familiar in what is not understood. Aniss looks at fragments of these archives choosing them for their texture, finding and losing himself within them. He incorporates them into his works and turns them into invitations. An invitation to react, to continue the flow of reactions and conscious opposition to how the “different” was shaped in the Western mind.
This is the moment when notions such as catharsis and ecstasy, which follow a temporal sequence, give way to exhaustion, pain, and violence - stages that form a collective. When the body is possessed, for whom does it act? When the body is numb, whom does it represent? The archive does not function here as a legacy that preserves history, since history finds other ways to survive. The archive becomes a part of the story, offering depth to movement and focus to thought.
I resist my need to describe images from the videos. Description is not the way to contain things, and where should I focus in the end? In this black-and-white more aestheticized scene that fulfills my taste’s criteria? Isn’t the awareness that we are outside, observing a scene, precisely the way not to live it? I don’t know if there is something to live through the images, yet I feel the sharing. I feel the willingness to experience claustrophobia together and to transform it into something else, to feel what we have not thought about.
To become the animal they will attribute to us and to wake up like that every morning, until we become the one that was chosen to be sacrificed.
These rituals come from an era of oppression and restriction, from the enslavement of bodies in 14th-century Morocco, serving the sense of community and commonality once the body loses its individuality and surrenders itself to others to be handled. This relationship, fueled by violence, defines an aesthetic and it reflects in Aniss’s work moments of violence elsewhere, that are probably more familiar to us: a destruction that should not have happened, a state that does not protect, a repression that makes no sense.
Aniss, however, does not operate as an anthropologist—first of all because he does not have that distance. He offers us a work that, as it evolves, seems to move from intense, continuous speech towards abstraction, creating an open space for others to enter. In the installation BLAME US, this intensifies as he distances himself from the finitude of each film, from the need for something to be completed in time. He continually opens it up, fragments it, searching within each piece for the essence of his work, and brings them back to their initial state before editing. Along with segments not included in previous works and recent audio material from interviews in Morocco, they are recomposed this time within the space.
The composition is worked as if there were no walls or ceilings, as if these five screens, like the five senses, communicate. They communicate blindly since Aniss does not know at what point someone will leave the first floor to move downstairs, nor how many seconds that transition will take, nor whether, before lowering their head to the ground floor, they will cast one last glance at the screens. This unity, the unification of the fragmentary, also functions like a ritual that needs the separation into individualities in order to unite them again. The story here, no matter how much we look at it, has no flow; it has sharp edges and cuts, and that feeling that you have seen it somewhere before.
You look at them from the outside, because you are evidently not inside. And they tell you to go back, further back, and not to accuse them, not to force them to justify themselves. The beginning you are searching for is not here, and they did all they could to transfer it to today.
Exhibition Team
Curator: Eva Vaslamatzi
Gallery director : Isavella Kladaki
Sound creation and installation : Ilias Kampanis
Video Editor : Benedetta Marchiori
Technical installation: Makis Faros , Nikos Stathopoulos
Graphic design: Ibrahim Swerky
©2025 Nabil Aniss