Mémoires sédimentaires: Mouhcine Rahaoui
If sedimentary memories reach into the depths of lived experience, Mouhcine Rahaoui invites us to consider these “layers of sediment” as “layers of sentiments”. Working with materials intrinsically bound to the realities of mining, the artist seeks to evoke the fragility of the human condition as it is shaped by, and inseparable from, the world of labour.
Sedimented Sentiments
While human memory and geological strata may invite comparison—whether visual, conceptual or metaphorical—Mouhcine Rahaoui’s practice engages with something altogether more subjective: a form of memory shaped by experience, transmission and reconstruction. This is what comes into focus in his current body of work, entitled Mémoires sédimentaires (Sedimentary Memories).
Mouhcine Rahaoui was born in 1990 in Jerada, a town nestled against the mountains of Morocco’s Oriental region, its landscape tinged brick red, a colour transformed into revolutionary red during demonstrations in this “city that symbolises Morocco’s trade union struggles” [1]. This red resurfaces in fragments throughout Rahaoui’s work. Descended from a family of coal miners, he draws on a visual vocabulary that invokes, without overstatement, the elements that have shaped his gaze and his relationship with the world. “These sedimentary memories are the memories of miners: of their working conditions, but also of their passage through the world, of what they give to it, and of the traces they leave behind,” he explains. The lives of miners—their joys, their tragedies and their lived experiences—are carried in Mouhcine Rahaoui’s memory and felt in his own flesh. His artistic practice emerges from a particular social condition and relationship to labour: that of his family, which each of his artistic gestures seeks both to honour and to recover. Rahaoui casts an unmistakably critical gaze upon this reality. His works are invitations to collectively confront and acknowledge the brutality of the systems that shape and permeate humanity today. They also raise a fundamental question: “How can art pay tribute to the suffering of miners without risking its aestheticisation?”
Each material, along with its potential uses, is carefully considered and brought into dialogue within the pictorial space, in relation to the miners’ lives, and their struggle to survive, as well as the enduring nature of their labour. Plastic fibres and the sacks used to bring extracted coal to the surface occasionally become the very supports for his works. Candles, used to monitor oxygen levels within the coal seam, and the trails of wax they leave behind—material evidence of human presence—find their way onto his canvases. Coal itself, bearing the memory of the place from which it is extracted, is omnipresent. Ropes, without which movement underground would be impossible, form another recurring motif throughout the body of work. Described by the artist as an “umbilical cord”, they connect the miner to the earth’s womb. Colour, too, draws on the visual imaginary of the mine: coal black, but also yellow, evoking the warning signs and codes through which danger is made visible in the mining environment.
In this new series, Rahaoui’s works occasionally move beyond the square, a modular unit whose repetition in a grid structures certain production lines while also informing the conventions of traditional painting. Assembled wooden battens, brought together without any predetermined configuration, sometimes provide the framework for his compositions. Coal sacks are likewise stacked in strikingly regular sequences, as in Lumière de filon 3, 2026, recalling the visual patterns of geological strata as they emerge across mountain landscapes. If sedimentary memories reach into the depths of lived experience, Rahaoui invites us to consider these “layers of sediment” as “layers of sentiments”. Working with materials intrinsically bound to the realities of mining, he seeks to evoke the fragility of the human condition as it is shaped by, and inseparable from, the world of labour.
Text by Olivia Fahmy
Art Historian and Curator at the Gandur Foundation for Art, Geneva
[1] OLLIVIER, Théa, “Morocco. Jerada: A City Symbolising Morocco’s Trade Union Struggles,” Libération, 12 January 2028.
