“All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.”
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is The Message, 1967
“At the very beginning of my career, when I was still living in Morocco, I was always fascinated by those useless materials: antenna cables, VHS tapes, obsolete typewriters. In a way, all these objects reassure me. All these archaic technologies express the end of something, a moment in our history. Most of all, they are about death. A great deal of my work consists of reanimating them, or rather accompanying their mutation from useful objects to useless ones and ultimately to simple archive documents.”
mounir fatmi, 2018
"In this exhibition, mounir fatmi looks at the impact of new technologies on memory, while questioning medium obsolescence. The evolution of technological and scientific progress led to a quick replacement of analog media caught up by digital images in a more and more virtual society. The artist therefore brings back to life anachronistic tools that used to be worshiped, like typewriters and antenna cables, in order to question the revolution of the image and the medium, which profoundly affected our perception of the world and distorted our memory. The title of the exhibition, The White Matter, refers to the white substance present in our brain and responsible for conveying information in the nervous system. This type of tissue is composed of millions of communication cables, each containing one long fiber called axon surrounded by a white substance, the myelin, which facilitates signal transmission. Like cities connected via telephone lines, these white cables connect neurons from one region of the brain to another. mounir fatmi’s white world invites us to immerse ourselves in this white matter, which is constantly evolving, up to the wireless connection system of our hyper-connected society."
Paola Soave, March 2019
