When taking his oath as a customs officer, Randa Maroufi’s father declared that he would be committed to « considering the foreign traveler as a guest in my country. » This idea inspired the title of this exhibition : The Other As Guest.

For her work at the Centre d’art contemporain Chanot, Randa Maroufi draws from structures both old and new, investigating the liminal spaces, invitations, identities, and borderline contexts she shows in all their multi-faceted complexity with her images.

Randa Maroufi’s camera focuses on people and public events that often remain undocumented. Her projects take the form of videos, photographs, installations, and performances ; they emerge from encounters with people, places, and visuals

she collects. In the hopes of disrupting the observer’s given point of view, Maroufi plays with possible interpretations of specific moments and proposes a decontextualized approach.

Her positioning of the camera, choreography of bodies, and chromatic and compositional choices lend a pictorial pop to her images, allowing her to generate videos with many different meanings.

Moving between text and camera, Maroufi’s videos shed light on situations, narrating stories based on concrete and material facts. In order to give visibility to the people living on the Moroccan-Spanish border of Ceuta who work within an informal economy, the artist works with clothing and fabrics, inscribing her imagery in the practice which has its own tradition within artistic history.

Maroufi’s works develop from the long period of time she spends on location and her analysis of what she sees there. They speak the way she comes to understand the people she meets ; most of the individuals featured in her films play themselves onscreen. The stories she tells speak to the human element instilled in her method from start to finish. 

In 2021, the CACC will accompany the artist during a creative residency for the production of a new work. In this video coproduced with the CACC, Randa Maroufi stages two men who try to fold a blue flag in an intricate, fumbling motion. What should be a simple task turns out to be a challenge. In this nod to the official gesture of folding the flag, the men fight against the materiality of the cloth, resulting in a heartfelt and occasionally humorous dance.

The exhibition benefits loan from the collections of Frac Champagne-Ardenne and Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.