Mohamed Bourouissa

Marta Gnyp: What have kept you busy the last months?

Mohamed Bourouissa: I’ve been working on the show in Arles and my wife is pregnant.

MG: Congratulations, so you are going to be a father? when?

MB: This month.

MG: That’s a big change! No time to waste then, so let’s switch to your artistic work. I would like to start with the project that gets a lot of attentionin your oeuvre: Horse Day. Is it also special for you?

MB: I think so. This work has changed a lot of things for me: firstly, the ways of showing of my work and secondly, how I made things. I wanted to make a film in Philadelphia about the urban horse riders but when I was there, I also created an event. Somehow, I felt that this event, or the performance if you wish, could be even more important than the film. My practice has changed a lot as from that moment on.

MG: How did this performance look like?

MB: I organized a performative talk, invited musicians and showed some of my videos. I explained my work, not in a very simple way, but instead I wrote a poem. I was creating an environment.

MG: These experiences in Philadelphia have changed your practice so you could embrace other possibilities of making art?

MB: They did. I also learned a lot about perception: about my perception of the Americans, and after I came back to France about my own perception of my situation of an immigrant in France. It changed the way how I perceive my own life and what is going on in France.

MG: I had the impression that you don’t like to be categorized as immigrant simply because you were born in Algeria, but that you prefer to be considered French.

MB: I’m French but now I define myself as French who was born in Algeria, I’m not going to change that. I speak Algerian and my whole family is part of that history. I have thought that being an artist means that the nationality is in the second place. I work in France, I speak French, but my experience in the United States showed me, almost like a body experience, that I have different types of identity at the same time, I’m not this or that. Sometimes I was worried about how people would look at me and put me in one box. The fact is, I was born in Algeria, I am a son of a woman who emigrated to France for economic reasons and this is part of who I am.

MG: How old were you when you immigrated to France?

MB: Five years old.

MG: You really grew up in France.

MB: I grew up in France with my friends coming from different areas and different countries. If I had to define my identity, I would say I am from the suburbs, more than being an Algerian or a French.

MG: Your family came to France for economic reasons. How did you find your way into art? This doesn’t seem to be an obvious choice.

MB: For sure it was not! When I came to France my French was extremely bad, so the first contacts with the language were quite complicated for me. Today I think that I might have been a little bit autistic. I started to draw images trying to communicate with other kids. My mum was not from the artistic kind of world, she was a woman who was cleaning houses. I was making drawings as a way to communicate with other people through art. Then those friends would be looking at my drawings and say, “Oh, this is cool what you’re doing.” I started to be recognized for that and I just followed this interest. In the beginning, I didn’t know what it meant to be an artist or to be in art school. I was just following this ideal to be a man who draws.

MG: Your limitations in the language pushed you into drawing.

MB: That’s exactly what it was!

MG: And then at a certain moment of time you discovered the idea of the artist?

MB: Yes, but it took me a lot of time to understand that. I had some friends, who were making art too. When I was sixteen, I decided to go to the school of drawings and graphics where I could continue to make drawings. There was a contest to enter the school and I got accepted.I spent a few years there until I was nineteen and then I went to the university. I didn’t really know what I was doing but I just followed this feeling.

MG: What happened at the university?

MB: I did a master at the university and after that I decided to go to École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where I studied photography specifically. Subsequently I went to another school and I made my first film called Time Out.

MG: Photography and film have become more important than drawing.

MB: Yes, very important, I’m still thinking like a photographer: I like to be on the spot, I like to be in the context. Photography gives me this opportunity to communicate comparable to what I was doing with the drawing when I was a kid; but there is a big difference. When you draw you are more in your world, with photography you have a chance to see what’s going on outside. Using photography, I was trying to represent what’s going on around me and my friends. I was trying to offer a memory of my own generation.

MG: There are thousands of photographs about your generation and your group in the newspapers . . .

MB: Now, but not in 2003!

MG: Which means you were a pioneer of photographing your group from inside?

MB: I think so. At that time there were not many artists looking at people from the suburbs like it is the case now. I can give you a very nice example about shoes. We have this Nike shoes called TN – I don’t know if you are familiar with these kinds of shoes – you can check that on the Internet. They were worn by people from the suburbs in the 1990s and 2000s, but now they have become very fashionable among the general public. Every new generation has its kind of shoes, but these come from the suburbs. At the end of the 1990s it was not so common that my generation in this specific context would be represented in art. Sure, people from the suburbs were depicted in art before, but it was more to stress certain social aspects. I was simply trying to get the pictures of what we had and what we liked. I discovered this amazing book of Jamel Shabazz in the United States Back in the Days. He photographed people from Bronx and Harlem – not showing them as grateful for the attention, or exhausted; instead, he was simply trying to show his and their own culture. I was really shocked because it was exactly what I wanted to see in my own pictures. My friends and I were joking, having fun, we had a certain type of clothes, we had certain rituals. Now you can see that everywhere.

MG: How did you practically take the photos? I can imagine that you were part of a very specific culture: were your friends or acquaintances not afraid that you were going to expose them publicly too much? That you could disclose secrets of your community? Were they very willing to cooperate with you?

MB: It depends. There were two sorts of photographs: I was taking pictures of my friends, but sometimes I would go to this place called Châtelet-Les Halles in the center of Paris, where you could find crowds of people from the suburbs because it was the main transit hub of the RER. They would go there to buy shoes, clothes, or sometimes just to sit there, meet friends or maybe to date a girl or a boy. I thought that we need to get a memory of this place and now it’s crazy because it has become history. I’m going to show that project titled Nous sommes Halles in my show in Arles this summer.

MG: Amazing. What about the beautiful series Périphérique, for which you used staged photography? How did you convince your friends to be part of it? Did they understand what you were doing?

MB: Some of them understood, some of them did not. I started this project when I was in the art academy. When I explained the project to one of my friends, Yassin, and told him, “Okay, I want to represent you in your way, in your neighborhood and I want you to get a picture of your friends,” he said, “Oh, this is weird, Mohamed, it’s not what I want to do, I’m sure nobody wants to be part of that, this is really impossible.” Another friend said, “Yes, this is great, cool, and we have to do this,” and he helped me for almost two years to find different kinds of people. I was at school inside Paris, a lot of people of this school were from the suburbs, I also had different friends from different neighborhoods in France. Some of them were easy, some of them not.

MG: Did you pay them to participate in the project?

MB: No! I didn’t have any money at that time, I was a student. Now I try to pay everyone who works with me because now I can.

MG: What about the other series? Temps mort was very special because you landed inside a community that is completely unknown to the big public, the jail, and presented it in a very voyeuristic way. How did you come to this idea and how did you make it work?

MB: In 2008 I met someone who became a very good friend. He was living in Clichy and was a drug dealer. I hadn’t heard anything from him for almost one year when one day he called me and said, “Oh Mohamed, how are you?” I said, “Hi, what’s going on? You had to call me, but you didn’t,” and he said, “I’m sorry, but I’m in prison now.” I was confused. He told me that he got a phone in prison and needed some utilities for his phone, but he couldn’t buy them himself. I agreed to arrange it for him. This relationship became very intense for me and I asked him to make a project together. It was the first series I made, only with pictures. After that, when he left prison, I asked him if he knew someone who could reproduce this experience not with images but using a film. I think the real subject is not what it is like to be in prison, but it’s about inside and outside, what does it mean for a human to be somewhere where you can’t go out. I was trying to represent that with this guy in the film called Jisse. The film aimed at showing also our relationship and how the relationship was growing.

MG: How was the reception of this work?

MB: In France relatively cold, especially at the beginning; outside France it was great. The only thing I‘m sad about is that I showed this film just one time.

MG: What was the problem in France? Was the public afraid that you are glorifying the criminals?

MB: I don’t know. Some thought that I was using people for my own benefit. Maybe one part of the project is that indeed. Another problem could be that I was critical about the French society. I was thinking about the human condition in France.

MG: Do you think that this kind of social critique is a task of an artist like you, or perhaps artists in general? To confront people with a situation and take a very clear position?

MB: I’m not trying to say that something is wrong or good, ethical or not ethical. I like to present situations though human relations, like a friendship, and this friendship can’t go further because there is a wall. I’m not trying to blame directly the society because it’s not about that; I’m grabbing this opportunity to clarify or maybe to question some situations of our times, that’s what I’m trying to do.

MG: To analyze, to dissect and to show without moral judgment.

MB: Exactly! For example, I made a series called Shoplifters. I got photographs taken by the manager of a shop in Brooklyn, of people who have stolen from this supermarket; they were small things like oil or cake, etc. He would then hang these pictures on the wall so the doormen could see who comes. I took a picture of the pictures and I decided to represent them in my show. I’m trying to understand what it means to take a picture of someone, what is the position of the photographer, what’s the position of the shoplifters being caught in the pictures; I’m trying to understand all these mechanisms. If it was about the moral judgment, I wouldn’t show these pictures. I take the risk to be judged about what I’m doing because I think that it is the only way for better understanding what’s going on in this kind of situation.

MG: That society is about exclusion and inclusion?

MB: Exactly!

MG: This has become extremely relevant.

MB: Yes, you feel that everywhere in Europe.

MG: If we take this shoplifters series as an example, there is a very urgent question related to photography but not only this medium: the question of authorship and originality. I’m sure you have played around with these issues consciously since it was the French post-structuralism that put it so central. I was wondering for example how these issues worked out in the Horse Day. You said that you were influenced by Martha Camarillo, who had made a book with the photographs about the same community as you did later on.

MB: Exactly.

MG: Was she offended because actually you have taken on a similar project as she had done?

MB: Now you touch upon the propriety. Your question is a bit weird because you confuse the object with the subject. Can a subject be your property? I think nothing is yours and nothing is mine. These people are subjects, not objects. She was talking about the people as if they are objects, but for me they are not, they are subjects. I phoned Martha Camarillo a couple of times to say thank you to her because she brought me to this subject. I haven’t stolen the subject from anyone because it’s not new; riders and horses and African Americans having their horses in the city is not something extraordinary, including the idea of exotism. When I started to make this project in Philadelphia, I wanted to do something about this representation, about the way the cowboy had been represented. I started to make my own research about cowboys and riders and slowly understood more about the Secession War. Martha was commissioned by Life to make this documentary and once she did the story then she made a book. It is a hard question, but I didn’t steal anything.

MG: You were shoplifting . . .

MB: Shoplifters are a nice example: when I took pictures of the pictures their quality was completely destroyed.

MG: They were blurred.

MB: Yes, they became very blurred and I did a lot of retouch. I was working hard with Photoshop just to reveal the portraits of the people on the image. That means, it was not just me taking over the existing pictures; I really worked on the image to reveal what’s going on in the image too. What is the subject of the image?

MG: if we speak about the authorship, for another series you made, Legend, you gave your camera to other people.

MB: Yes.

MG: It’s your work but actually someone else is doing the filming.

MB: True. The movement of the body was connected to the camera. I tried to reverse the eyes of the camera. I remember in 2011 you had this TV show with some journalists going to dangerous places with a hidden camera looking what the dealers are doing and trying to discover what is the black market, etc. I spent a lot of time in Barbès. In the beginning I really wanted just to show the cigarette sellers and to make a film about them, but quickly I understood that they were really living there, making the architecture of that place with their own movements. I proposed to them to wear a camera and to represent the space and what they see; to reverse the point of view. It was a kind of a collaboration between them and me.

MG: Did you intervene in their actions?

MB: When you watch this film, it feels like it was improvised but it was completely constructed. I have cut and put together all the sequences having lots of different takes. I was trying to recreate the way how I can make films, too. For me the form has to be very close to the subject, that’s why I proposed to the guys to have a camera on their own body.

MG: The form should fit into the subject, a very classic idea about art.

MB: For sure! For the film not so easy though, because the form is quite the same. I wanted to find another way to make films. Do you remember this film Leviathan made by a guy who was using the GoPro? He was using this kind of tools to be inside the body of things, and I was trying to do that with Legend.

MG: Every film of yours is different in an experimental way.

MB: That’s what I’m trying to do. A great cooperation was La valeur du produit. It was about a guy talking about his own business like a commercial product sales manager. In reality I asked an ex-drug dealer to explain to me his business, not talking about it like a dangerous illegal dealing that happens in the dark, but in another way, simply about his business model. Commercial managers would use the same system in talking about the supermarket. I proposed to him to dress like a manager and to explain to us his own business, I interviewed him, I wrote with him the script and we made this film together.

MG: Were these people not afraid of speaking about drug dealing with you?

MB: No, I’m actually sorry to say that, but I know a lot of drug dealers and explained exactly what I wanted to do in this film. On top of this, you don’t really see a face, and very important, this guy stopped drug dealing. There were other films where people were more afraid, for example Time Out. For the guy who made the film with me it was quite dangerous. I was worried sometimes about him because if he would be caught, for sure he would spend more time in jail. On the other hand, making Time Out gave him something to do and you can see that in the film, he was quite happy. It was an opportunity to do something else, he was totally involved in it. That’s why I think the film was very successful, not successful for the audience, but for what the film did to him and to me.

MG: Still, it’s kind of bravado to really go into this.

MB: It is. I’m sure you want to understand why I am doing this kind of subject.

MG: It’s extremely interesting for us, for the public, because it’s very voyeuristic and exotic. You get a glimpse of a world which the majority of us doesn’t know; it’s a community within the community. You have given the public access to this group. I could imagine people from this community could object, because you are opening them up to the gaze of a “normal” society.

MB: Honestly, I do nothing. I don’t glorify anything. I just try to understand or to compare these groups to a normal society, or what we call normal society. I’m trying to see in the same way like in Legend or La valeur du produit. It can be exotic but if you see this film from the beginning you are simply watching that very commercial guy talking about his own business. I’m just trying to understand things.

MG: You make marginalized people normal or mainstream.

MB: Yes, [laughs] but for me they are normal. I made a film about this person who was in psychiatric hospital in Algeria. He was a bit crazy, but for me it was fine that he’s different. He’s not like a regular person, but he had something to say and he taught me how to do gardening. He has spent almost forty years in a mental hospital and he was explaining to me how to make a garden. He was a patient, but he could teach me. Things are not so separated as they look like.

MG: A part of your work is the relationship between center versus periphery.

MB: Sure.

MG: There are many shifts between these two territories, what is center becomes periphery, what is periphery becomes mainstream in our times. A very good example you just gave about the shoes. Do you still live in the banlieues of Paris?

MB: Yes, I still live in Gennevilliers. I could go to live in Paris, but I prefer to stay there. The worst guys live in this place, and because of that it’s more secure for me. [laughs] I spent quite some time in Rio de Janeiro and I wanted to go to favelas, getting all instructions “Go this way, go this way, for sure you’re all right”. . . When I was finally there, and I tried to understand what was going on in the favela, I discovered that if you are around the favela, at its borders, then you feel it’s dangerous. Drug dealers do their own business, sometimes they are fighting with each other, it can be really dangerous for you or for your neighbors. But if you live inside the favela and you don’t go outside, it is safe because there is a powerful social security. If you walk alone in the center of Rio on Sunday, something can happen to you, but if you are in middle of the favelas being introduced there you can spend the whole Sunday there and nothing happens to you. [laughs] It’s more complex than what we think. I feel more secure in the banlieue because I’m a part of something and the people know me, although for sure there are some bad things going on . . .

MG: What you suggest is that the most dangerous places, maybe also metaphorically, are the places where the systems meet each other and where a conflict can arise. If you are within a system or within a community that’s fine, whatever community it is. These are the edges in which you are living in one sphere and going into the other. These are the most dangerous ones.

MB: Yes. I don’t have any truth about this. I’m sorry if I sometimes could be confusing.

MG: I think that’s a very interesting thought. Maybe it also applies somehow to the artistic mediums, that a lot is happening on the edges. What about sculptures? You made the hoods sculptures; this is also kind of urban riding of a different sort. What was the idea behind that?

MB: When I had come back to France, after having spent almost one year abroad, I had plenty of pictures that I had taken during my time in Philadelphia. I firstly wanted to show these pictures in a classic frame, but I was worried that this representation could look very exotic, which in my opinion was a distortion of the reality. When you look at the pictures inside a car, using the car as a mirror, you can see all the distortion of the city on their surfaces. I thought it was maybe the right thing just to project the pictures on the car body to make them look as if seen through the prism, not directly the real image.

MG: You have made many variations of the hoods, some of them more sculptural than the others. Are you going to continue this series?

MB: I will present this series again in the near future in September in a gallery in Los Angeles. After that I will stop this kind of work. I developed a different way to make pictures, taking advantage of the digital possibilities to show images I made in Algeria. I’m very interested about the experimental support for my photography.

MG: Each project brings you into new ideas about either the medium or the subjects you’re working with.

MB: Exactly.

MG: Regarding your studio practice, you have assistants in your studio. How much do you do yourself and how much are you giving to other people to help you?

MB: It depends on what I do specifically. Working on the biggest hood I had twenty assistants helping me to build the big piece; when I was making the small hoods, I printed that with assistance of someone and had one person who brought all bigger elements together. I often return to existing works, rework the form of the structure or put more elements on it and after that my assistants help me just to fix everything. I like to have the hand on the creativity of the piece. It can take time to understand how things work. I work with these two people who help me making works, one person who takes care of all the logistics and another person who manages all the studio, we are four.

MG: Quite controllable.

MB: It’s not so big.

MG: If you think about your generation, how do you see your artistic practice versus the post-war heroes? Do you think that your generation has something specific about the idea of being an artist?

MB: Maybe the melancholy, or, I’m trying to find a good word, a sort of defeatism. We have to deal with the situation where we are now. During the 1990s we were talking a lot about resistance; twenty years ago, the resistance was a very important idea for everyone. I feel that today our generation has to deal with resilience but maybe more with the melancholia of it. We have to accept the world, then we have to deal with that and find a way to transform that not in a very brutal way.

MG: So, you are pragmatic fatalistic.

MB: I think for me that’s true, but I can’t speak for everyone.

MG: Do you think about the viewer when you make your films or your photographs? Is your attention given to the participant of the work rather than to the recipient of the work?

MB: It depends on the work. For example, I have this project inside a supermarket in Arles where they have an empty space. This supermarket employs about twenty people. When I did research for this project, I discovered a beautiful body of works made by Jacques Windenberger who has been the photographer of this region in France for forty years. I decided to invite him to my show to present his work to the people of the supermarket, and he said, “Mohamed, I want to show my work, but I want to make pictures too.” I told him that it is up to him how he wants to work. Finally, during the time I had my show he was going to show the pictures that were chosen by the employees and at the same time he was going to show the pictures he took of the people of the supermarket. Now I would like to invite them to be inside and to produce a new type of work. This is the way I’m working. I need free thinking. I don’t try to control too many things, I just choose to see if it matches with my work, but I listen too. If I work in collaboration, I try to have this kind of protocol which can be very inclusive. That’s where I am now.

MG: Are you mostly working on a few projects at the same time?

MB: I am. For example, now I am working on a sculpture with flowers, asking the question how we produce things. When you are an artist you have to produce things with different materials. I want to change my production and the materials I use in order to be, let’s say, ecological. I am using a lot of kinds of material which cause pollution, like paint, varnish or resin.

MG: You are now producing ecologically responsible flowers?

MB: I’m trying to. It’s a new state for me.

MG: Another question – not impertinent I hope – your name sounds Muslim.

MB: Yes, sure.

MG: Are you Muslim?

MB: I try to be sometimes!

MG: There has always been a conflict regarding making images in Islam.

MB: Yes, I know, but it is a more recent conflict. At the beginning, during the time of the Prophet you had a lot of images of people, also Muslim people. This idea of representation or self-presentation is not so old, it’s actually brand new.

MG: I could imagine that you could be one of the model people for the immigrant community, or specifically Muslim community, like the football player Salah for example, who is a very successful Muslim living in Europe. Working with images, on the other hand, makes you kind of suspicious . . .

MB: Yes, I don’t want to be a model for anyone! [laughs]

MG: Maybe for your child later on . . .

MB: If I can be the model for my son that would be great! [laughs] I think the most difficult thing is to be human and I think that’s a lot. For sure if I can give some inspiration to anyone, even to other Muslims, that’s great, but I don’t have the pretensions to be a model for anyone. The truth doesn’t exist for me, there are millions of individual truths.

MG: Tolerance is an attitude of a role model.

Marta Gnyp: What have kept you busy the last months?

Mohamed Bourouissa: I’ve been working on the show in Arles and my wife is pregnant.

MG: Congratulations, so you are going to be a father? when?

MB: This month.

MG: That’s a big change! No time to waste then, so let’s switch to your artistic work. I would like to start with the project that gets a lot of attentionin your oeuvre: Horse Day. Is it also special for you?

MB: I think so. This work has changed a lot of things for me: firstly, the ways of showing of my work and secondly, how I made things. I wanted to make a film in Philadelphia about the urban horse riders but when I was there, I also created an event. Somehow, I felt that this event, or the performance if you wish, could be even more important than the film. My practice has changed a lot as from that moment on.

MG: How did this performance look like?

MB: I organized a performative talk, invited musicians and showed some of my videos. I explained my work, not in a very simple way, but instead I wrote a poem. I was creating an environment.

MG: These experiences in Philadelphia have changed your practice so you could embrace other possibilities of making art?

MB: They did. I also learned a lot about perception: about my perception of the Americans, and after I came back to France about my own perception of my situation of an immigrant in France. It changed the way how I perceive my own life and what is going on in France.

MG: I had the impression that you don’t like to be categorized as immigrant simply because you were born in Algeria, but that you prefer to be considered French.

MB: I’m French but now I define myself as French who was born in Algeria, I’m not going to change that. I speak Algerian and my whole family is part of that history. I have thought that being an artist means that the nationality is in the second place. I work in France, I speak French, but my experience in the United States showed me, almost like a body experience, that I have different types of identity at the same time, I’m not this or that. Sometimes I was worried about how people would look at me and put me in one box. The fact is, I was born in Algeria, I am a son of a woman who emigrated to France for economic reasons and this is part of who I am.

MG: How old were you when you immigrated to France?

MB: Five years old.

MG: You really grew up in France.

MB: I grew up in France with my friends coming from different areas and different countries. If I had to define my identity, I would say I am from the suburbs, more than being an Algerian or a French.

MG: Your family came to France for economic reasons. How did you find your way into art? This doesn’t seem to be an obvious choice.

MB: For sure it was not! When I came to France my French was extremely bad, so the first contacts with the language were quite complicated for me. Today I think that I might have been a little bit autistic. I started to draw images trying to communicate with other kids. My mum was not from the artistic kind of world, she was a woman who was cleaning houses. I was making drawings as a way to communicate with other people through art. Then those friends would be looking at my drawings and say, “Oh, this is cool what you’re doing.” I started to be recognized for that and I just followed this interest. In the beginning, I didn’t know what it meant to be an artist or to be in art school. I was just following this ideal to be a man who draws.

MG: Your limitations in the language pushed you into drawing.

MB: That’s exactly what it was!

MG: And then at a certain moment of time you discovered the idea of the artist?

MB: Yes, but it took me a lot of time to understand that. I had some friends, who were making art too. When I was sixteen, I decided to go to the school of drawings and graphics where I could continue to make drawings. There was a contest to enter the school and I got accepted.I spent a few years there until I was nineteen and then I went to the university. I didn’t really know what I was doing but I just followed this feeling.

MG: What happened at the university?

MB: I did a master at the university and after that I decided to go to École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where I studied photography specifically. Subsequently I went to another school and I made my first film called Time Out.

MG: Photography and film have become more important than drawing.

MB: Yes, very important, I’m still thinking like a photographer: I like to be on the spot, I like to be in the context. Photography gives me this opportunity to communicate comparable to what I was doing with the drawing when I was a kid; but there is a big difference. When you draw you are more in your world, with photography you have a chance to see what’s going on outside. Using photography, I was trying to represent what’s going on around me and my friends. I was trying to offer a memory of my own generation.

MG: There are thousands of photographs about your generation and your group in the newspapers . . .

MB: Now, but not in 2003!

MG: Which means you were a pioneer of photographing your group from inside?

MB: I think so. At that time there were not many artists looking at people from the suburbs like it is the case now. I can give you a very nice example about shoes. We have this Nike shoes called TN – I don’t know if you are familiar with these kinds of shoes – you can check that on the Internet. They were worn by people from the suburbs in the 1990s and 2000s, but now they have become very fashionable among the general public. Every new generation has its kind of shoes, but these come from the suburbs. At the end of the 1990s it was not so common that my generation in this specific context would be represented in art. Sure, people from the suburbs were depicted in art before, but it was more to stress certain social aspects. I was simply trying to get the pictures of what we had and what we liked. I discovered this amazing book of Jamel Shabazz in the United States Back in the Days. He photographed people from Bronx and Harlem – not showing them as grateful for the attention, or exhausted; instead, he was simply trying to show his and their own culture. I was really shocked because it was exactly what I wanted to see in my own pictures. My friends and I were joking, having fun, we had a certain type of clothes, we had certain rituals. Now you can see that everywhere.

MG: How did you practically take the photos? I can imagine that you were part of a very specific culture: were your friends or acquaintances not afraid that you were going to expose them publicly too much? That you could disclose secrets of your community? Were they very willing to cooperate with you?

MB: It depends. There were two sorts of photographs: I was taking pictures of my friends, but sometimes I would go to this place called Châtelet-Les Halles in the center of Paris, where you could find crowds of people from the suburbs because it was the main transit hub of the RER. They would go there to buy shoes, clothes, or sometimes just to sit there, meet friends or maybe to date a girl or a boy. I thought that we need to get a memory of this place and now it’s crazy because it has become history. I’m going to show that project titled Nous sommes Halles in my show in Arles this summer.

MG: Amazing. What about the beautiful series Périphérique, for which you used staged photography? How did you convince your friends to be part of it? Did they understand what you were doing?

MB: Some of them understood, some of them did not. I started this project when I was in the art academy. When I explained the project to one of my friends, Yassin, and told him, “Okay, I want to represent you in your way, in your neighborhood and I want you to get a picture of your friends,” he said, “Oh, this is weird, Mohamed, it’s not what I want to do, I’m sure nobody wants to be part of that, this is really impossible.” Another friend said, “Yes, this is great, cool, and we have to do this,” and he helped me for almost two years to find different kinds of people. I was at school inside Paris, a lot of people of this school were from the suburbs, I also had different friends from different neighborhoods in France. Some of them were easy, some of them not.

MG: Did you pay them to participate in the project?

MB: No! I didn’t have any money at that time, I was a student. Now I try to pay everyone who works with me because now I can.

MG: What about the other series? Temps mort was very special because you landed inside a community that is completely unknown to the big public, the jail, and presented it in a very voyeuristic way. How did you come to this idea and how did you make it work?

MB: In 2008 I met someone who became a very good friend. He was living in Clichy and was a drug dealer. I hadn’t heard anything from him for almost one year when one day he called me and said, “Oh Mohamed, how are you?” I said, “Hi, what’s going on? You had to call me, but you didn’t,” and he said, “I’m sorry, but I’m in prison now.” I was confused. He told me that he got a phone in prison and needed some utilities for his phone, but he couldn’t buy them himself. I agreed to arrange it for him. This relationship became very intense for me and I asked him to make a project together. It was the first series I made, only with pictures. After that, when he left prison, I asked him if he knew someone who could reproduce this experience not with images but using a film. I think the real subject is not what it is like to be in prison, but it’s about inside and outside, what does it mean for a human to be somewhere where you can’t go out. I was trying to represent that with this guy in the film called Jisse. The film aimed at showing also our relationship and how the relationship was growing.

MG: How was the reception of this work?

MB: In France relatively cold, especially at the beginning; outside France it was great. The only thing I‘m sad about is that I showed this film just one time.

MG: What was the problem in France? Was the public afraid that you are glorifying the criminals?

MB: I don’t know. Some thought that I was using people for my own benefit. Maybe one part of the project is that indeed. Another problem could be that I was critical about the French society. I was thinking about the human condition in France.

MG: Do you think that this kind of social critique is a task of an artist like you, or perhaps artists in general? To confront people with a situation and take a very clear position?

MB: I’m not trying to say that something is wrong or good, ethical or not ethical. I like to present situations though human relations, like a friendship, and this friendship can’t go further because there is a wall. I’m not trying to blame directly the society because it’s not about that; I’m grabbing this opportunity to clarify or maybe to question some situations of our times, that’s what I’m trying to do.

MG: To analyze, to dissect and to show without moral judgment.

MB: Exactly! For example, I made a series called Shoplifters. I got photographs taken by the manager of a shop in Brooklyn, of people who have stolen from this supermarket; they were small things like oil or cake, etc. He would then hang these pictures on the wall so the doormen could see who comes. I took a picture of the pictures and I decided to represent them in my show. I’m trying to understand what it means to take a picture of someone, what is the position of the photographer, what’s the position of the shoplifters being caught in the pictures; I’m trying to understand all these mechanisms. If it was about the moral judgment, I wouldn’t show these pictures. I take the risk to be judged about what I’m doing because I think that it is the only way for better understanding what’s going on in this kind of situation.

MG: That society is about exclusion and inclusion?

MB: Exactly!

MG: This has become extremely relevant.

MB: Yes, you feel that everywhere in Europe.

MG: If we take this shoplifters series as an example, there is a very urgent question related to photography but not only this medium: the question of authorship and originality. I’m sure you have played around with these issues consciously since it was the French post-structuralism that put it so central. I was wondering for example how these issues worked out in the Horse Day. You said that you were influenced by Martha Camarillo, who had made a book with the photographs about the same community as you did later on.

MB: Exactly.

MG: Was she offended because actually you have taken on a similar project as she had done?

MB: Now you touch upon the propriety. Your question is a bit weird because you confuse the object with the subject. Can a subject be your property? I think nothing is yours and nothing is mine. These people are subjects, not objects. She was talking about the people as if they are objects, but for me they are not, they are subjects. I phoned Martha Camarillo a couple of times to say thank you to her because she brought me to this subject. I haven’t stolen the subject from anyone because it’s not new; riders and horses and African Americans having their horses in the city is not something extraordinary, including the idea of exotism. When I started to make this project in Philadelphia, I wanted to do something about this representation, about the way the cowboy had been represented. I started to make my own research about cowboys and riders and slowly understood more about the Secession War. Martha was commissioned by Life to make this documentary and once she did the story then she made a book. It is a hard question, but I didn’t steal anything.

MG: You were shoplifting . . .

MB: Shoplifters are a nice example: when I took pictures of the pictures their quality was completely destroyed.

MG: They were blurred.

MB: Yes, they became very blurred and I did a lot of retouch. I was working hard with Photoshop just to reveal the portraits of the people on the image. That means, it was not just me taking over the existing pictures; I really worked on the image to reveal what’s going on in the image too. What is the subject of the image?

MG: if we speak about the authorship, for another series you made, Legend, you gave your camera to other people.

MB: Yes.

MG: It’s your work but actually someone else is doing the filming.

MB: True. The movement of the body was connected to the camera. I tried to reverse the eyes of the camera. I remember in 2011 you had this TV show with some journalists going to dangerous places with a hidden camera looking what the dealers are doing and trying to discover what is the black market, etc. I spent a lot of time in Barbès. In the beginning I really wanted just to show the cigarette sellers and to make a film about them, but quickly I understood that they were really living there, making the architecture of that place with their own movements. I proposed to them to wear a camera and to represent the space and what they see; to reverse the point of view. It was a kind of a collaboration between them and me.

MG: Did you intervene in their actions?

MB: When you watch this film, it feels like it was improvised but it was completely constructed. I have cut and put together all the sequences having lots of different takes. I was trying to recreate the way how I can make films, too. For me the form has to be very close to the subject, that’s why I proposed to the guys to have a camera on their own body.

MG: The form should fit into the subject, a very classic idea about art.

MB: For sure! For the film not so easy though, because the form is quite the same. I wanted to find another way to make films. Do you remember this film Leviathan made by a guy who was using the GoPro? He was using this kind of tools to be inside the body of things, and I was trying to do that with Legend.

MG: Every film of yours is different in an experimental way.

MB: That’s what I’m trying to do. A great cooperation was La valeur du produit. It was about a guy talking about his own business like a commercial product sales manager. In reality I asked an ex-drug dealer to explain to me his business, not talking about it like a dangerous illegal dealing that happens in the dark, but in another way, simply about his business model. Commercial managers would use the same system in talking about the supermarket. I proposed to him to dress like a manager and to explain to us his own business, I interviewed him, I wrote with him the script and we made this film together.

MG: Were these people not afraid of speaking about drug dealing with you?

MB: No, I’m actually sorry to say that, but I know a lot of drug dealers and explained exactly what I wanted to do in this film. On top of this, you don’t really see a face, and very important, this guy stopped drug dealing. There were other films where people were more afraid, for example Time Out. For the guy who made the film with me it was quite dangerous. I was worried sometimes about him because if he would be caught, for sure he would spend more time in jail. On the other hand, making Time Out gave him something to do and you can see that in the film, he was quite happy. It was an opportunity to do something else, he was totally involved in it. That’s why I think the film was very successful, not successful for the audience, but for what the film did to him and to me.

MG: Still, it’s kind of bravado to really go into this.

MB: It is. I’m sure you want to understand why I am doing this kind of subject.

MG: It’s extremely interesting for us, for the public, because it’s very voyeuristic and exotic. You get a glimpse of a world which the majority of us doesn’t know; it’s a community within the community. You have given the public access to this group. I could imagine people from this community could object, because you are opening them up to the gaze of a “normal” society.

MB: Honestly, I do nothing. I don’t glorify anything. I just try to understand or to compare these groups to a normal society, or what we call normal society. I’m trying to see in the same way like in Legend or La valeur du produit. It can be exotic but if you see this film from the beginning you are simply watching that very commercial guy talking about his own business. I’m just trying to understand things.

MG: You make marginalized people normal or mainstream.

MB: Yes, [laughs] but for me they are normal. I made a film about this person who was in psychiatric hospital in Algeria. He was a bit crazy, but for me it was fine that he’s different. He’s not like a regular person, but he had something to say and he taught me how to do gardening. He has spent almost forty years in a mental hospital and he was explaining to me how to make a garden. He was a patient, but he could teach me. Things are not so separated as they look like.

MG: A part of your work is the relationship between center versus periphery.

MB: Sure.

MG: There are many shifts between these two territories, what is center becomes periphery, what is periphery becomes mainstream in our times. A very good example you just gave about the shoes. Do you still live in the banlieues of Paris?

MB: Yes, I still live in Gennevilliers. I could go to live in Paris, but I prefer to stay there. The worst guys live in this place, and because of that it’s more secure for me. [laughs] I spent quite some time in Rio de Janeiro and I wanted to go to favelas, getting all instructions “Go this way, go this way, for sure you’re all right”. . . When I was finally there, and I tried to understand what was going on in the favela, I discovered that if you are around the favela, at its borders, then you feel it’s dangerous. Drug dealers do their own business, sometimes they are fighting with each other, it can be really dangerous for you or for your neighbors. But if you live inside the favela and you don’t go outside, it is safe because there is a powerful social security. If you walk alone in the center of Rio on Sunday, something can happen to you, but if you are in middle of the favelas being introduced there you can spend the whole Sunday there and nothing happens to you. [laughs] It’s more complex than what we think. I feel more secure in the banlieue because I’m a part of something and the people know me, although for sure there are some bad things going on . . .

MG: What you suggest is that the most dangerous places, maybe also metaphorically, are the places where the systems meet each other and where a conflict can arise. If you are within a system or within a community that’s fine, whatever community it is. These are the edges in which you are living in one sphere and going into the other. These are the most dangerous ones.

MB: Yes. I don’t have any truth about this. I’m sorry if I sometimes could be confusing.

MG: I think that’s a very interesting thought. Maybe it also applies somehow to the artistic mediums, that a lot is happening on the edges. What about sculptures? You made the hoods sculptures; this is also kind of urban riding of a different sort. What was the idea behind that?

MB: When I had come back to France, after having spent almost one year abroad, I had plenty of pictures that I had taken during my time in Philadelphia. I firstly wanted to show these pictures in a classic frame, but I was worried that this representation could look very exotic, which in my opinion was a distortion of the reality. When you look at the pictures inside a car, using the car as a mirror, you can see all the distortion of the city on their surfaces. I thought it was maybe the right thing just to project the pictures on the car body to make them look as if seen through the prism, not directly the real image.

MG: You have made many variations of the hoods, some of them more sculptural than the others. Are you going to continue this series?

MB: I will present this series again in the near future in September in a gallery in Los Angeles. After that I will stop this kind of work. I developed a different way to make pictures, taking advantage of the digital possibilities to show images I made in Algeria. I’m very interested about the experimental support for my photography.

MG: Each project brings you into new ideas about either the medium or the subjects you’re working with.

MB: Exactly.

MG: Regarding your studio practice, you have assistants in your studio. How much do you do yourself and how much are you giving to other people to help you?

MB: It depends on what I do specifically. Working on the biggest hood I had twenty assistants helping me to build the big piece; when I was making the small hoods, I printed that with assistance of someone and had one person who brought all bigger elements together. I often return to existing works, rework the form of the structure or put more elements on it and after that my assistants help me just to fix everything. I like to have the hand on the creativity of the piece. It can take time to understand how things work. I work with these two people who help me making works, one person who takes care of all the logistics and another person who manages all the studio, we are four.

MG: Quite controllable.

MB: It’s not so big.

MG: If you think about your generation, how do you see your artistic practice versus the post-war heroes? Do you think that your generation has something specific about the idea of being an artist?

MB: Maybe the melancholy, or, I’m trying to find a good word, a sort of defeatism. We have to deal with the situation where we are now. During the 1990s we were talking a lot about resistance; twenty years ago, the resistance was a very important idea for everyone. I feel that today our generation has to deal with resilience but maybe more with the melancholia of it. We have to accept the world, then we have to deal with that and find a way to transform that not in a very brutal way.

MG: So, you are pragmatic fatalistic.

MB: I think for me that’s true, but I can’t speak for everyone.

MG: Do you think about the viewer when you make your films or your photographs? Is your attention given to the participant of the work rather than to the recipient of the work?

MB: It depends on the work. For example, I have this project inside a supermarket in Arles where they have an empty space. This supermarket employs about twenty people. When I did research for this project, I discovered a beautiful body of works made by Jacques Windenberger who has been the photographer of this region in France for forty years. I decided to invite him to my show to present his work to the people of the supermarket, and he said, “Mohamed, I want to show my work, but I want to make pictures too.” I told him that it is up to him how he wants to work. Finally, during the time I had my show he was going to show the pictures that were chosen by the employees and at the same time he was going to show the pictures he took of the people of the supermarket. Now I would like to invite them to be inside and to produce a new type of work. This is the way I’m working. I need free thinking. I don’t try to control too many things, I just choose to see if it matches with my work, but I listen too. If I work in collaboration, I try to have this kind of protocol which can be very inclusive. That’s where I am now.

MG: Are you mostly working on a few projects at the same time?

MB: I am. For example, now I am working on a sculpture with flowers, asking the question how we produce things. When you are an artist you have to produce things with different materials. I want to change my production and the materials I use in order to be, let’s say, ecological. I am using a lot of kinds of material which cause pollution, like paint, varnish or resin.

MG: You are now producing ecologically responsible flowers?

MB: I’m trying to. It’s a new state for me.

MG: Another question – not impertinent I hope – your name sounds Muslim.

MB: Yes, sure.

MG: Are you Muslim?

MB: I try to be sometimes!

MG: There has always been a conflict regarding making images in Islam.

MB: Yes, I know, but it is a more recent conflict. At the beginning, during the time of the Prophet you had a lot of images of people, also Muslim people. This idea of representation or self-presentation is not so old, it’s actually brand new.

MG: I could imagine that you could be one of the model people for the immigrant community, or specifically Muslim community, like the football player Salah for example, who is a very successful Muslim living in Europe. Working with images, on the other hand, makes you kind of suspicious . . .

MB: Yes, I don’t want to be a model for anyone! [laughs]

MG: Maybe for your child later on . . .

MB: If I can be the model for my son that would be great! [laughs] I think the most difficult thing is to be human and I think that’s a lot. For sure if I can give some inspiration to anyone, even to other Muslims, that’s great, but I don’t have the pretensions to be a model for anyone. The truth doesn’t exist for me, there are millions of individual truths.

MG: Tolerance is an attitude of a role model.