Opening: Saturday July 26th, 6 p.m
“Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” asked Bertolt Brecht. The names of kings appear in books, but were they the ones who dragged the stone blocks? This project draws on the poem “Questions from a Worker Who Reads”, in which the German playwright, with sharp irony, questions who the real builders of great palaces, exuberant cities, and famous battles were. In other words, who are the protagonists forgotten by history? Brecht deconstructs the heroic narrative focused on illustrious names and instead highlights the anonymous bodies -the invisible workers. This question is carried into the visual realm, where the works in this exhibition challenge the memories embedded in architecture, the traces left by the bodies that build and inhabit it, as a way of uncovering a brick.
The brick—a minimal unit, a simple shape, a cube of fired clay—becomes a symbol of that which provides support yet remains hidden. It is rarely visible: usually covered by plaster, facades, or paint. Like the workers who lay it, its presence is structural but invisible. In this exhibition, the brick serves as an allegory for the bodies it supports, for the memories buried within the material, and for the layers of history that cover and uncover what seemed obsolete. While in some works it appears as a structural module, support, or symbolic object, in others it takes on a subversive role: a way of de-hierarchizing materials, breaking dominant narratives, and illuminating the cracks in history.
Image: Hicham Benohoud, The hole 3.