Party on the CAPS By Meriem Bennani

A cartoon crocodile/cereal box icon leads watchers through a fictional US territory, a future island in the Atlantic where rejected migrants are teleported into a smash-up of bodies and cultures: this is Meriem Bennani's Party on the CAPS, a sci-fi-docu-narrative that imagines the ugliness and the beauty that can spawn when things are taken apart and put back together. Bennani's work is a virtual palimpsest, a metaphysical meets artificial world laying upon a real one, identities and emotions bubble from the humanity behind the pixels, a place where "having a body is never taken for granted." 

The "dislocated population" of the CAPS are "reassembled with violence" mirroring the realities of the present that many are forced to deal with when encountering borders, barriers and perceived difference. In the post-screening Q&A presented by Rhizome online in May, Bennani spoke of the way that diaspora is viewed as an anomaly when it isn't (a concept she attributes to a Paris-based philosopher-- whose name I could not catch in the stream!), pretending there is a duality forces a binary, an ongoing, manufactured conflict used to distract, assimilate and disperse.

Stylistically, the film feels like a social media feed, content connects and flickers -- images, histories, futures, music, fantasy user interfaces, CGI, "real" viral memes-- flow into a funnel of singular experience. A birthday party in a Morroccan enclave within the CAPS features Bennani's actual family happily living in their familiar yet futuristic world. Augmentation/enhancement through technology is exaggerated just slightly beyond present-day reality, poking at the wobbly lines of time, space and genre as needs and desires morph into each other beyond recognition. Bennani's signature smirk is evident throughout, a tone that feels totally appropriate in the face of life's growing excess and insanity.

Even though this piece is supposed to be seen as a part of a larger installation, Bennani said the single-channel version of the film is a more democratic viewing experience, something she continues to play with during pandemic isolation in her most recent Instagram collaboration.



2 Lizards is a series of micro-shorts made by Bennani and Orian Barki, a look at the lockdown lives of two lizards living in the confines of New York City during peak Covid-19. The series is another fictionalized documentary, a hybrid of real-world images and animation channeling a pervasive digital existence. The animated, anthropomorphic animals make the pieces feel like modern-day fables while also obscuring the tendency to label. Feelings and moods provoked by unending stimulus and news cycles highlight the wonder and anxiety that normally buzzes through the neurotic privilege of the city, states that are now heightened by mortal urgency.

Curator/artist Aria Dean, who facilitated the Q&A online for Party on the CAPS, spoke of the "defamiliarizing tactic" that Bennai's work takes on, Bennani responded with how documentary and sci-fi are both "world building...every choice becomes an intention, nothing is a given" which makes art "symbolic...charged with history and charged with politics." Both Party on the CAPS and 2 Lizards skew the reality of a skewed reality and do so in a way that itches with newness under eerie, funny, existential skin. There is always hope clinging to absurdism and there is always-- as Bennani said, "a third possibility for thriving"--, a revolution, clinging to the very best art.

May 20, 2020
Party on the CAPS, Livestream/Single Channel and Q&A
Via Rhizome (New Museum)
Recorded Q&A here

2 Lizards streaming via Instagram