THE MATERIALISATION OF EMOTION

After representing Madagascar at the 2019 Venice Biennale and opening an art space in his hometown, JOEL ANDRIANOMEARISOA now expresses his art of emotions through Moroccan crafts in a major museum show.

- Y-JEAN MUN-DELSALLE

Visual investigations of love, passion, desire, hope, despair or melancholy, Joël Andrianomearisoa's works originate from an emotion or a sensation. "I'm from Madagascar, but I'm trying to have a discussion with the entire world," he says.

"My art brings emotions, but inside of those emotions, you have questions and discussions. I believe that the idea of emotion, which is in all of us, can create something, can be something. So I'm trying to figure out this idea of universal elements that can touch everybody. For example, sadness and tears; we all have a little part of sadness within us. When I'm talking about emotion, I'm really talking about all of us together, so it's really the idea of 'us'. And then I think emotion has something to do with the idea of the hands, the craftsmen, the handmade - I think they're all connected."

We're inside the artist's exhibition, Our Land Just Like a Dream, at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Marrakech, one of the few private contemporary art museums in Africa that was the brainchild of architect Othman Lazraq, who is also the director of Fondation Alliances, a non-profit organisation for cultural development in Morocco.

Running until July 16, 2023, the museum's very first solo show dedicated to a contemporary artist is "a declaration of love to the land and to the hand", states Andrianomearisoa. "The land is Morocco, it's Marrakech, it's the museum. The land is a technique, a land, a people, a smell, an atmosphere. So it's very patriotic, and then to connect it with the idea of emotion, affirming the dream, that this land is actually just an excuse to open the discussion to all other discussions."

VIVA EXOTICA