The world out there is a complex one, but the arts can help you make sense of it. In the evocative and deeply introspective work of Sana Chamakh, the personal meets the political in exploring identity and memory. Her work turns the human body into a theatre of resilience and transformation, much like a naked symphony of textures and emotions.
Chamakh’s recent solo exhibition, Strata Of Being at 32 Bis Art Center in Tunis, exemplifies this approach. Her diverse work forms a nexus of personal and collective reflections, questioning the intersections of identity, space, and memory.
In your artistic journey, you have focused extensively on the human body, particularly your own. How did this focus evolve, and what questions did it raise about identity and self-representation?
A few years ago, I decided to concentrate my research on the body, using my own body as a subject of study. The starting point was to explore gender through representations of the female body. With this idea in mind, I began to work on some techniques to make the traces my body leaves on a surface sensitive and visible. As I experimented, new research avenues emerged. I became highly interested in how these experiments could affect the image of my body which led me to several questions: is deconstructing my image an effort to reconstruct my identity? Is manipulating my image a new form of self-staging? Is it a work entirely closed off to my body, or could it become a crossing point between the public and the private? How could we open up to the other, beginning inside the self?
In a way, I view my work as a passage from one state to another, allowing various formal superimpositions—a departure with the desire to return. If viewed from the outside, my working process may seem melancholic, but in essence, I attempt to build an identity. By questioning the link between space, the self, and others, I ask myself how places can discuss identity and memory.
Fabrics play a significant role in your work, particularly in how they interact with the body. What drew you to textiles, and how do they function within your artistic practice?
My journey with fabrics started in fashion school, where I began experimenting with textiles. I was immediately drawn to their tactile qualities and profound connection with the human body.
Fabric, akin to a second skin, mediates between our bodies and the external world. Its touch is intimate, simultaneously concealing and revealing. In my artistic exploration, the fabric becomes a metaphor for skin. Through various techniques, I’ve discovered that fabrics can emulate diverse aspects of the body—skin textures, imprints, folds, and even the delicate intricacies of internal organs. The textures invite tactile exploration, forging intimate connections and becoming conduits for sensory experiences. Textiles, in their constant interaction with our bodies, serve as personal coverings and outward expressions of inner identity. They constitute the deepest and most visible layers through which we communicate ourselves to the world.
What about the Un-stitched series?
The Un-stitched series exemplifies my approach, blending paper drawings with fabric to create altered sewing patterns. Traditionally, these patterns dictate the construction of garments, providing templates for cutting and assembly. Yet in Un-stitched, intentionally distorted measurements render the patterns unwearable. This deliberate subversion challenges societal norms of ideal body shapes, proposing new templates for hybrid, alternative forms. By deconstructing imposed standards, I aim to liberate forms, creating silhouettes that are raw, unapologetic, and honest.
Here, the silhouette loses its fixed contours, hovering in space and charting new trajectories. The body transforms into a cartographic landscape, exploring states of nomadism and transition between forms. This exploration of ‘deconstruction and reconstruction’ views the body as a malleable surface, capable of continuous reshaping and redefinition.
Poetically, it mirrors a journey. By displacing the body across diverse spaces, I expand its geographical narrative. Is this a map devoid of coordinates, designed to guide or disorient? It merges my identity, image, and place, leading everywhere and nowhere simultaneously—perhaps towards a ‘non-place’ where all spaces converge. And with this, I aspire to map the migrant body, a cartography of perpetual movement, transient spaces, non-places, passages, bridges, and metamorphoses. Ultimately, I envision crafting a body map that serves as a symbol, a construction, a representation, and a locus of potential resistance.
Migration and displacement are recurring themes in your work.
In my practice, I’ve come to understand that employing my body as the primary medium, multiplying my image and presence, and transposing myself across various mediums can evoke or re-enact a form of migration. This realization resonates deeply with my experience as a Tunisian woman raised in Tunisia and living in France for the past three years. It has heightened my awareness of the impossibility of inhabiting multiple places simultaneously and in diverse forms—it’s a metamorphosis, a shift in state.
This transformation mirrors the intricate construction of a bird’s nest—an ephemeral refuge constructed and abandoned with each passing season. Like a nest, my artistic endeavours evoke notions of flight and migration patterns, embodying moments of transit and corporeality within a continuum of past and future movements.
Central to my exploration is the displacement and exile of my body, symbolised by materials like fabric that explore the interplay between wounds and their mending—wounds that require care and attention. Each stage of this migration of my image represents crossing new thresholds, blending impressions of space, environment, and borders into a poetic language of memory. I strive to imaginatively bridge the spaces I have inhabited, reconfiguring memories of ‘home’ in the present moment. At the heart of this endeavour lies the notion of healing—metaphorically and literally—this migrating body.
Your work has a profound focus on the female body, particularly in challenging historical representations.
My work delves into the body, through a feminist perspective, engaging with contemporary forms where individual and collective traumas serve as raw material for artistic reflection. My objective is to politicize the body, using it as a vessel to bear witness to personal and collective histories. Through employing my own body as the primary medium, I investigate the intricate connections between memory, trauma, and communal healing. Art, in this context, emerges as an alternative discourse, resisting linear narratives by transforming the body into a living testament and an act of artistic resistance. It becomes a juncture for personal and collective healing, bringing trauma into public discourse and broadening representation beyond the individual. This approach seeks to unearth and preserve narratives that might otherwise vanish from future archives, memories, and emotional landscapes. Navigating these themes is inherently challenging, particularly in maintaining accuracy.
Could you share a particular artwork where you felt this challenge most acutely?
One artwork that vividly encapsulates this challenge is Etude d’un bleu. In this series, I meticulously documented a substantial bruise on my body, capturing its daily evolution through photographs. These images unveiled the silent metamorphoses of the body, revealing its perpetual motion and resilience. Through photography, I documented this transformation process, fostering a healing narrative that transcended the visible wound to address the unseen scars. Observing the daily changes in my body instilled a profound awareness of its resilience, even amidst battles I had not consciously acknowledged.
This documented transformation took on a ritualistic dimension for me, simultaneously intimate and public, continually evolving before the viewer’s eyes. It creates a repository of universally relatable human experiences—a compendium of personal narratives that collectively politicize intimate histories.
Your artistic practice celebrates imperfection and resilience. How do you navigate the historical ties of gender representation and the embodiment of female experiences?
From the moment one must act to exist—as an artist, a woman artist, and a racialized woman (will these qualifiers ever be abandoned?)—I endeavour to push the boundaries of form. My goal is to construct a radical, political, intimate, and poetic body, propelled by a desire to enact change and redefine spatial limits. The imagination of the female body has historically been a socially constructed and colonized terrain, rather than a realm of individual self-determination. By asserting the right to representation and self-representation, my artistic inquiry becomes a space for actively reconstructing the portrayal of the female body.
Can you elaborate on how you celebrate imperfection and resilience through your artistic representations of the human form?
I celebrate imperfection and resilience by embracing the unique qualities and vulnerabilities inherent in each body. My work often depicts figures that defy conventional standards of beauty, emphasizing their authenticity and humanity. Through artistic experimentation, I highlight that imperfections are integral to the human experience, serving as reminders of our shared struggles and resilience.
In representing the human form, I employ techniques such as distortion, fragmentation, and abstraction to convey the complexity and fragility of human existence. These artistic choices challenge societal norms and expectations, encouraging viewers to reconsider their perceptions of beauty and perfection. Themes of resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity resonate throughout my work, portraying figures overcoming obstacles or embracing their flaws.
My exploration of the human form, beginning with my own body, serves as a testament to the beauty found within imperfection and the resilience inherent in human nature. Through these representations, I invite viewers to see the human body as a powerful site of memory, trauma, and healing—a canvas reflecting both personal narratives and collective experiences.
How do you approach the creation of specific artworks, such as Standing Still?
The relationship between body and space has always fascinated me, especially through the medium of drawing. Drawing brings me into direct contact with the body or what remains of its presence, as seen in the metal shield used in Standing Still. For me, the body is an act of understanding the world. When I draw, I use my own body as a unit of measurement—its size, its speed of movement, its resistance. My body becomes both my strength and my obstacle. This transcendence, the act of stepping out, and going beyond, is provoked by my confrontation with space.
Many of my works are free exercises in experimentation. The process of working with new materials and the uncertainty of the outcome give me the freedom to focus on trusting the process rather than controlling the result. I explore the limits of the body, seeking to go beyond the contours of human nature and surpass my physical boundaries.
In Standing Still, the body becomes that of a traveller, searching for ways to cross borders and surpass physical limits. It’s an attempt to overcome all kinds of borders imposed by ourselves or the outside world, inviting us to rethink and revise the socio-political borders that surround us.
We are animate beings, living in bodies with the desire to move. Yet, as we navigate life, many of us encounter protocols, beliefs, old paradigms, and conditioning that encourage us to stand still. These hindrances affect our ability to think, feel, and perceive movement. Like a tree with roots going in all directions, despite the metal shields attempting to control our growth, our branches ultimately find liberation.
Your art invites viewers to engage with narratives beyond the visual. How do you see your role as an artist-storyteller, and what narratives do you aim to convey through your work?
I see my role as an artist-facilitator of narratives that extend beyond the visual realm. My primary objective is to reframe traumas and memories, offering a form of justice through artistic expression. Memory, within my practice, serves as a tool to confront forgetting and erasure, enabling acts of “reparation and redress” akin to justice. I focus on the transformative journey after trauma, emphasizing post-traumatic change and renewal. This transformation is mirrored externally in the traces left—such as skin textures, scars, and bruise colours—or internally, through profound shifts in vision, perception, and memory.Â
The process of self-reconstruction following deconstruction gives rise to new forms, patterns, materials, and textures imbued with a poetic sense of movement, change, and trajectory. I employ materials like fabric and leather, which echo human body characteristics in texture, colour, or appearance. These materials, akin to a second skin, mediate between the body and the external world, weaving a relationship of veiling and revelation. Textures like silicone appeal to the sense of touch, fostering connections and serving as conduits for intimacy.
In my artistic practice, these materials create a sanctuary—a refuge where the body can rest, heal, and reside. They establish a nexus between skin and gaze, location and temporality, the visible and the invisible. Through these narratives, I invite viewers to explore themes of resilience, healing, and the intricate layers of human experience, fostering deeper understandings of personal and shared histories.
Lastly, could you share some closing remarks on the importance of empathy, resistance, and solidarity in your artistic practice and in confronting the contemporary challenges we face globally?
My journey of research and experimentation began as a personal exploration of my body. However, it swiftly expanded beyond the individual, revealing a broader terrain where personal emotions transmute into collective experiences. This shift enabled me to explore the effects that define this journey, transposing the intimate into the public sphere through the interplay of reality, representation, and abstraction.
In my work, I strive to present a traversable space—an alternate perspective that challenges conventional viewpoints. Tactility plays an important role in bridging the gap between art and audience, transforming art appreciation into an embodied experience that reconnects viewers with their senses and skin.
Through my artistic practice, I endeavour to convey a message of solidarity and shared humanity. I aim to assure others who may feel estranged in their bodies that they are not alone. My work seeks to create a meeting point where skin and fabric intersect the inner and outer worlds, bridging connections across time and space.
Fundamentally, as human beings, I believe our deepest fear is not death itself but the fear of being alone in an unfamiliar and empty space. True belonging stems from connecting with others, engaging in continual dialogue, and finding a sense of home within a community.
I leave traces of my being, my body, and my identity within my work to initiate dialogues with others—to transform, occupy space, and coexist alongside diverse bodies and identities. Inviting intimacy and personal inquiry into the creative process isn’t just a starting point; it’s an ongoing invitation for conversations between myself and others.
Ultimately, I invite viewers to actively participate in a journey through the cartography of a body—sometimes mine, sometimes theirs. What defines a stranger? How do we welcome them? Hospitality, as defined, is the way we receive others, be they travellers or refugees. It holds moral legitimacy and can challenge the conditions of togetherness in our society.
Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality resonates deeply here: it’s not something definable but an enigmatic experience—an invitation to expose oneself to the other beyond knowledge and consciousness. Similarly, my work displayed and exposed in space becomes an invitation—an invitation to contemplate, connect, and embrace the complexities of human existence.
It evokes empathy, resistance, and solidarity by exploring the intersections of personal and collective experiences, inviting viewers to embark on a shared journey of introspection and connection.
LINK
- Celebrating imperfection and resilience: an interview with Sana Chamakh - July 19, 2024
- Interview with Thomas Egoumenides - May 24, 2024
- Exploring the Poetics of Human Form: An Interview with Zoulikha Bouabdellah - March 1, 2024
