24 Hours Of A Hole – How did I come to dig holes?
Many people ask me, and I admit it is curious. They grew out of my desire to take the limits of the absurd to an extreme as a form of cathartic escape from a particularly nightmarish period of my life. It was all about creating a fixed point by digging a hole at a specific place in the terrestrial globe.
My artistic motivation, as a migrant, is to suggest that every human being has a natural desire to construct a space they can truly call his or her own. It is also about returning to the past.
Digging uncovers the superposition of both the Earth’s layers and its history. This is my way of imposing rationality and stability by working within a fixed timetable upon my return to it.
I had not imagined, before digging my first hole, how many objects and sediments I was going to find inside my excavation; nor that they would become an extension to my work. I was overwhelmed by the pieces I discovered on that first dig, and my present collection bears testimony to the individuality of each of my holes (my first dig was 1998).
This on going collection of holes will be finished in 2008. I dig for four hours a day between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. over a period of six days).
Furthermore, my videos and photographs record not only the evolution of my work, but also the varying reactions of my spectators from one site to another.
Take for example the enormous difference between my winter dig behind the Milch gallery of London and my performance in Bamako in Mali. The first brought about long periods of solitude due to the cold deterring visitors from staying long, whilst the second excited great curiosity and rapidly became a focal point for social gatherings.
I would say my work inserts itself within the philosophy that Francis Alÿs summarized so well in his statement:
I’m obsessed with finding that moment of coincidence between what I call the experience of living and the consciousness of experience.
It is the unexpected foregrounding of incidents, coincidences and improvisations of my work that fascinates me more and more.
For instance, the video ‘around a hole’, shown at Milch gallery in London in February 2001. It is a video from my second hole in Bamako. Surprisingly, rather than figuring me as central, I seem to be absent from this work. In fact, I am more than present, being entirely engrossed in my work. However, I am too deep in the hole for the camera to pick me up and, instead, a snippet of local life is captured and framed in the foreground, the frame, bringing the exchange between my friend Mamadou and a vendor sharply into focus.
This raises questions for me about the location of the artwork, and who, if anyone, can be said to be the protagonist.
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