Interview with Messaouda Bouras:

Q: Are you a person who expends tremendous energy merely to be normal?
A: I expend a tremendous amount of energy merely to be.

Q: So do you consider yourself an existentialist?
A: I am trying to be an existentialist, but I think that can only make me an absurdist.

Q: Does that mean you search for clarity and meaning within a world that offers neither?
A: It means I search for obscurity and senselessness in a world that offers both. In fact I'm looking for misunderstanding. I think that the space between meaning and not-meaning is where I locate my work.

Q: What happens in the space between meaning and not-meaning? Is it not just a space of obscurantism?
A: No. I think that clarity is only possible in places where clarity itself is not the aim. The space that opens up between meaning and not-meaning is a timeless space for the viewer, the reader. Without a clear-cut moment of understanding, the viewer is tossed back and forth between her own reading and mine. Meaning is not pinned down to my particular formulation of it, but evolves with the viewer's understanding. There is a kind of triangulation of perspectives.

Q: Why is that moment of disorientation, of moving between perspectives, timeless? What does it have to do with time?
A: It suspends time in some sense because misunderstanding leaves open always the possibility of understanding. Possibility carries within itself a revolt against static.

Q: What do you mean by static? Do you consider yourself a revolutionary artist?
A: I consider art a means of revolt. By static I mean a stoppage of some sort.

Q: Where do you locate this static? How can it be identified and how can one revolt against it?
A: Static is located at the point of acceptance. When work stops being understood and misunderstood, when it asks for acceptance and fears rejection, it becomes static, isolated in a moment. Without movement it cannot revolt.

Q: Are you a political artist?
A: I don't think there is such a thing. There are artists who make work about politics but that can also be viewed as art about people and society at our moment in history.

Q: Can art about politics be timeless?
A: I think all art is timeless in the sense that any art can be viewed from the perspective of any given moment in history and seem relevant to that moment. It is perspective itself that is political.

Q: Do you think revolt -- being revolutionary -- is feasible for an artist in today's marketplace? In other words, how can you work, as an artist, if you do not seek some kind of acceptance by the market?
A: It is today's marketplace that creates the possibilty for revolt.

Messaouda Bouras is a writer and critic who was born in Oran and now lives between Yemen and Germany. She is a founding member of the dB foundation, an organization dedicated to exploring ideas of form, emptiness, and institutional spaces. She is also a member of the artists' collective SUMAC, a multi-national coalition which produces videos about escape and border-crossing. Bouras has worked extensively with the organization "No Person Is Illegal/Kein mensch ist illegal" and in 2002 organized a series of seminars called "Safe/House," focusing on immigration from Northern Africa through Eastern Europe. Her publications include an article in the dB foundation's "Heuristics" catalog (published in conjunction with its April 2006 exhibition "Aporia") and the book "Against Identity". She is currently working a new book, tentatively titled "Between Spaces."