…”The repetitive, hypnotic motions required by each task can be soothing, like an invitation to a meditative viewing experience. However, when all five videos play, their respective sounds overlap, making the physical space of the installation into a workshop of sorts; food production is likened to physical and repetitious factory work; and the hand becomes machine-like. Culinary work, as documented by Fakhir, “unfurls in a complex montage of things to be done according to a predetermined chronological sequence” (Giard, 158). The artist conjures up a mixed sense of wonder and alienation, stressing the economic exploitation of women as unrecognized domestic laborers: “On women’s passports, under ‘occupation,’ it says ‘none.’ They do not even exist on paper […], neither does their titanic labor, although it participates fully in everyday domestic economy. Without it we would be completely devoured by consumer’s society” (interview). Because the five videos are shown in an endless loop, the actions they depict are forever repeated and unending, likening the domestic laborer to a modern Sisyphus. The five separate tasks projected on the walls also give a sense of kitchen operations as piecemeal and separate sequences that do not progress towards one major accomplishment, but rather form a succession of small goals. Yet this is no tragic depiction of the domestic condition. The hands resolutely, and even joyously, engage in a choreography of coordinated gestures, as semolina particles agglomerate into couscous grains, again and again.
Fakhir depicts the minute, labor-intensive tasks that go into the sorting, preparation and storing of yearly food supplies. There is the sense that her installation works as inventory, just like the grandmother building up stocks for storage. In doing so, she preserves gestures attached to a disappearing subsistence economy and predating the industrialization of the food system. She also chooses the domestic gestures that marked the world of her childhood, its rituals and its imbued cultural values. Each staple has symbolic weight: both sugar loaves, a valuable wedding or mourning offerings (interview), and cereals, a symbol of prosperity and divine providence (Ferchiou, 1979, 190), form the foundation of Moroccan diet. The poor can live on sugar for tea, and bread dipped in olive oil. This choice of staples and the preparations she records rely on a transmitted savoir-faire that requires the hand as sole kitchen tool. To crack the block of sugar, the bottom of a glass is a resourceful, everyday implement, less showy and ceremonial than the copper hammers sold in tourist markets, but within reach, it clearly requires precise and supple wrist movements”…

Sylvie Durmelat
The Art of Saving Food: Preserving Gestures in Ymane Fakhir’s video installation, Handmade (2011-2012).