A place with uncertain boundaries and nebulous laws. Characters caught in an existence whose contours elude the camera’s gaze. Such is the world of a former amusement park in the Arab League Garden in Casablanca, through which Randa Maroufi leads us.
Actions frozen in gestures of exchange, waiting, and aggression are performed according to a score orchestrated by the artist, who, in the manner of Eric Baudelaire, explores reality through composition. Yet this reality is also virtual: some of the scenes are drawn from a repertoire of violent self-representations found online, whose visual vocabulary the artist appropriates. Violence is a language, she tells us, and its interpretations depend on context.
A strange vitality emerges from the gentle stillness of the silent tracking shot as it drifts among scenes enacted by people occupying the site, whether merely passing through or living there precariously. (…) At every hidden path, Randa Maroufi’s *Le Park* slips away from us, drawing us into a gentle dream whose outcome is never revealed. Indifferent to our presence, it murmurs its silent rhythm.
These scenes, these lives, the artist approached first with modesty, then with trust, always with respect. Never seeking to claim the untameable park or the lives inhabiting it as her own, Randa Maroufi brings us into contact with an intimate world on the threshold of a fury both real and imagined. With the sharpness and delicacy of a metal point, the artist sketches a forgotten tale at the heart of the city, yet on the margins of the world.
Text by Inès Bouaillon.