Spazio Lima

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Via Benedetto Marcello 2
20124 Milan, Italy

MON-FRI 11 A.M.-6 P.M.
SAT-SUN 12 P.M.-6 P.M.

ARTISTS:
Monia Ben Hamouda
Alberto Burri (Collezione Ramo)

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Monia Ben Hamouda answers questions from.
Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, curator of the Collezione Ramo.

Give a definition of what sketching is for you.
I would describe this media as a place of condensation and empowerment of certain elements that have always been part of my practice, but which I have only recently been able to dissect on paper. It is by no means a methodology of study or sketching for other projects, but a media with a weight that is important to me and that is able to untangle certain knots that would otherwise only be hinted at in my work. I think it is very similar to the act of writing, thus a very direct formal language that is not mediated by the compromises I encounter more often with sculptural and pictorial media.

What techniques and creative processes do you use when working on paper?
I found, after a long search, a very smooth ivory-colored paper that can accommodate drawing in the same quick and thoughtful way with which I install powders and spices within exhibition architectures. For the actual drawing I use a mix of different techniques: dry pastels (dusty and consisting only of pigment and water, very fragile), oil pastels (which glide across the paper), some charcoal (which I often create independently by burning some wood) and very thin black and gray India ink calligraphy pens.

Why did you choose this work from the Collezione Ramo?
It was not easy. Following an instinct that I would describe as atavistic, ancestral, my choice fell on a work by Alberto Burri.
There are so many things that bind me to this artist, whom during my studies I loved very much and whom I feel close in material momentum but far away on countless other planes, including political. Some of these aspects are also personal and what I would dare to describe as revenge (in ’43 he fought in Tunisia, the country from which part of my family comes).
His small combustion on paper, the act of setting fire to the works (an aspect on which I have also been working for several years) I think is a right way to begin this dialogue: from a psychomagic act, from a burning.

What value does the dialogue with modern drawing have for you?
For me it certainly represents a challenge, but also an opportunity to take a long, historical look at my own work: the possibility of reading or predicting the future, of trying to intuit whether and in what terms my practice is grafted into what we call Art History-whatever that is-or how it avoids or shuns it, and what space my work occupies (or does not occupy) in this historiographical path.