To mark his exhibition “Les sentiers de l’intranquillité,” currently on view at the Comptoir des Mines in Marrakech, we are republishing our visit to Hassan Bourkia’s studio, which took place in 2023. A timeless encounter with an artist who loves literature and poetry, a seasoned traveler of the world, surrounded by the writers whose works line the shelves of his studio.
By Olivier Rachet
By opening the doors to his studio, Hassan Bourkia reveals his most intimate self; and intimacy is the most precious thing we have to share. Like any encounter, this one begins with some small talk. A literary discussion over coffee, where—recalling Beckett—we wonder if to begin is to “fail better.” A shared meal on the road to Ourika, leading to the douar of Aït Bounnit (“People of Faith”), located about twenty kilometers from Marrakech. That is where the artist’s two studios are located. One is located in his private home, where he works on smaller pieces; the other is a few kilometers further on, where larger works are created in a courtyard sheltered by an orange tree.
These two spaces may hold the key to a body of work that is constantly evolving. They reflect the world that this man—a lover of literature and an Arabic translator of Nietzsche, Paul Ricoeur, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abdellatif Laâbi, and Rilke—never ceases to explore.
Since participating in an international symposium in 2008, he has traveled regularly to Jordan, where he exhibits in several galleries. He also participated in Amman’s first art fair in 2020. That same year, following his exhibition “Au nom des miens” (“In the Name of My People”), presented by Le Comptoir des Mines in Marrakech, Hassan Bourkia exhibited at the Bienalsur in Buenos Aires alongside Mohamed Arejdal, Pistoletto, and Boltanski, as well as at the Karla Osario Gallery in Brasília. Both the National Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo and the National Museum of Modern Art in Brasília have acquired one of his works for their collections.
A nomad in his own way, Hassan Bourkia is, above all, a man of upheavals and separations—much like Odysseus, the hero of the *Odyssey*, who never ceases to navigate between Charybdis and Scylla. Perhaps this is how life begins—with a brutal expulsion that we euphemistically call birth. “It all begins,” he confides enigmatically, “with the spirit of something to be erased.” ” And he reinforces his point by evoking the flight of birds destroying their nests “to go elsewhere, into the open.” Listening to this man enamored with poetry, one is often reminded of Mallarmé’s line: “Destruction was my Beatrice,” for it seems that for him it is less a matter of duplicating reality than of causing it to implode from within. “One must be a conqueror: destroy!” he asserts.
The Workshop of Souls
Looking at the works in progress scattered throughout his studio—shelves covered in dust or ash, charred or rust-eaten mailboxes, the sole of a sneaker overrun by a pile of fossilized snails— one realizes that the artist begins by dismantling the conventions and materials of the pictorial language he has long practiced as a self-taught artist. He has abandoned pigments, drawing, and color—with the exception of gray.
The aim is to bring together what is most fragile and fleeting: materials such as earth, dust, and ash, which perhaps come closest to the nature of things, to speak in the words of Lucretius, or to the soul, to paraphrase François Cheng, whose poetic and calligraphic work Hassan Bourkia admires. “I am one of those experimentalists—a group that includes writers, painters, and poets—who are convinced that the things we touch eventually grow old,” he comments. “We must therefore strive to go beyond things and beyond ourselves, ” in a constant back-and-forth between writing and painting, and a shared impulse of soul and body.
The soul is found in the artist’s main studio, through the ghosts of all these writers whose presence is first manifested by the imposing library located at the back of a long, silent room . “My studio belongs to souls,” he confides, adding that thanks to it he finds himself “at the center of the world.”
For this man, a close friend of Edmond Amran El Maleh—whom he describes as “the spiritual father of modern Moroccan art”—reading is by no means a pastime; rather, it is his most faithful companion. This is evidenced by a monumental installation currently in progress titled *Hospital of Souls*, consisting of an assemblage of shelves upon which dust-covered books sit, surrounded here and there by busts or arms wrapped in surgical bandages, from which IV drips hang in midair. “There is no longer any connection between the body and the book,” comments Hassan Bourkia. “Even the saline solution no longer exists. Everything that exists today is sick.”
This work, now nearing completion, might bring to mind a line by the German poet Rilke—whom the artist particularly admires—in which he states that all beauty is always “the beginning of the terrible.” Conceived as a long-term project—it often takes Bourkia several years to complete a work—this installation awaits only to be sprinkled with ash so that, through this paradoxical act of erasure, it may measure itself against the infinity of creation.
This infinity toward which other works in progress seem to reach, taking the form of a fetus here or that of a female sex elsewhere, as if art’s sole purpose were to confront the very mystery of birth and Time. An unfathomable enigma behind which the doors of a studio—one we might describe as cosmic—close. True life is elsewhere, no doubt, but it is also right here on earth.
