Latifa Echakhch – Hospitalité, 2006

Protean, understated and poetic, Latifa Echakhch’s work is structured around references that are both personal and political, literary and artistic, biographical and historical. Through her interdisciplinary installations, Latifa Echakhch is recognized for the fine balance between forcefulness and fragility in her visual language, her insertion of surrealist and conceptual elements, and her use of symbols that — in her own words — are both “political and poetic”

Copying an instruction from the top of a form used by the Préfecture de Police when applying for or renewing a residence permit, Latifa Echakhch has carved into the wall the words “Espace à remplir par l’étranger” (“Space to be filled in by the foreign national”). The artist has misappropriated the phrase in the document, extracting it from its context and its original function in order to question the notion of hospitality, a word that is etymologically linked to Latin hospes (host) and phonologically linked to another Latin word hostis (enemy/stranger). The sentence, which has its counterpart on the reverse, “To be completed by the official”, symbolically highlights the room for manoeuvre given to migrants by the government. The tiny amount of latitude afforded to the foreigner has, in the words of the artist, become an “excavated space, which, even once it has been filled in after the exhibition, will always exist”.