In Conversation with Oussama Tabti

“Homo-carduelis” at de Brakke Grond. Neighbouring Frequencies, FIBER Festival 2024. Photo credit: Pieter Kers

Borbála Magdolna Pal: Hey, how are you? How are you finding FIBER? 

Oussama Tabti: Hey, I am doing well. It is a sound festival, so that is super interesting because I mostly use low-tech stuff. 

Is it the tangibility of low-tech that catches your attention? 

Well, for instance in this installation, “Homo-carduelis” I used bird cages which I got at the flea market but the device that makes the installation work is pretty high-tech in terms of the speakers and media players. So I use the objects that I notice in my daily life, I am more interested in those. 

The other project (“Parlophone”) that I exhibited in De Brakke Grond last year was the doorbells, and when you ring them you can hear the stories of someone. So the doorbells are specific to Brussels, there is the original doorbell and then there are many others that are added when new people come, almost like an archive of people who have lived in the house– a residue. There is a constant play between something that is still working and something that is archeologic. I like the patina you get from retrieving things that are abandoned or about to be destroyed. You feel that there is a story behind this, and the objects have many lives. 

What I found when looking at your larger body of works, including the bird cages which you are currently exhibiting, is that your work revolves around systems and networks where things interact with one another but also encircle themselves. Regarding the notion of hermetic geopolitics, I was wondering if anything has changed since publishing that text in 2017. 

No, it's still right, it is still about geopolitics. Especially now, although I said ‘especially now’ six years ago. You know, I was born in Algiers and the same year there was a series of protests (a prelude to what the Arab Spring would look like almost) and around 600 people died and then a few years after that the civil happened for about 10 years which we call the ‘Black Decade.’ So my childhood was in the middle of all of that and we can see the repercussions of all of that in everyday life when you're there. My first time at art school too I was studying graphic design and I learnt how to observe and how to express an idea simply. Then my work started to become about observations.

My first artwork was books that I took from the Institut Francais. There was a library which I would go to and then I noticed that on the last pages of the books, there were yellow post-its with stamps that corresponded with the dates of the Black Decade and from 1994-1999 the Institut was closed so there were no stamps. I took it as a testimony of that period. From there I always try to talk about things and the human but without showing the human. I like to talk about what the human did, what the human left behind but without necessarily having them be present as an image. Since then everything has been related. The colonisation, the Civil War, the emigration to Europe. History is a chain. That is why the geopolitics is perfect.

So what about it makes it hermetic? In a way, geopolitics is a network of systems, yet some people cannot access this, and cannot access the globalised network. What about it makes it geopolitics, plural and not just a geopolitic? 

I do not think that there are different geopolitics, we all belong to one but through different angles, through the same shit [laughs]. I also feel that ever since moving to Europe I still talk about the same topics—the work I did in Algiers is maybe different to the work I am doing now formally—but it is linked thematically. Since it is my work but if I move to Colombia tomorrow, then sure the work will change but I am looking for things where I recognise myself. 

Yeah, I saw that within the larger body of your work, it is stubbornly coherent almost. Regarding “Homo-carduelis”, what is the difference between a border and a cage? 

A cage is a border and a border is a cage, maybe invisible but it is a cage. When you live in a country where you need a visa for everything you feel like you are in a cage. There is no normal, there is no escape. They are the same thing. 

Are there different types of cages then? 

Of course. I feel like human beings are extraordinary, they can achieve so many things– be smart, and live in symbiosis with nature—but we are living in an era where we are limited by so many things like capitalism, the geopolitics, the religions, the cultures. We are not totally independent or autonomous. The human being used to make its own food before hunting and maybe there will come a time when a generation does not know how strawberries are cultivated, or they cannot name a fruit.

I am impressed by the goldfinch firstly because it is part of my culture as we have it as a pet but held in captivity. So there is already this complex relation but the Latin, scientific name of the goldfinch is Carduelis carduelis, which comes from Carduus which is the thistle, the spikey plant. The goldfinch is incredible because nature made them able to eat from this spikey and really difficult plant and in this difficult context the human being decided to put him in a cage and give them a small quantity of food. That is my first idea about the installation, we can have more but this was my initial starting point.