Cracks in the Pavement

It’s 2024, and uncertainty has become the norm. This dual public feeling of anxiety and yearning for human connection is captured in Meriem Bennani’s sculptural installations and hybrid animation-documentary films made with Orian Barki. Onscreen, the duo’s oft-used motif of cartoon, anthropomorphized animals-as-avatars wax poetic as they navigate precisely rendered city streets and apartments. Real life is ingested, metabolized, and spit out in a visual language so distinct in its likeness to life as we know it, yet so uncanny in its delivery that we can’t help but stare in awe and resonance.

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Born and raised in Morocco but now based in New York, Bennani has always skirted the edges of her own life in her art. As she expands her practice, she has found a way to translate the spirit of animation into physical forms. The screens that she has used to show her films first became three-dimensional and later became sculptures in-and-of themselves starting in 2017 at Art Dubai. For a work displayed on New York’s High Line from 2022 to 2023, Windy, a human-sized whirling dervish of circular sheets stacked in a cone from biggest to smallest spun non-stop like a tornado, the Tasmanian devil, or perhaps even the artist’s own life. For Bennani, these unknown and tactile elements offer a new approach both grounded and dependent on the limits of material—less malleable than animation, more ripe in its rigidness. How much can she bend, build, and push physical objects to their extremes? The question might very well propel her to new heights.

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In “For My Best Family,” her exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan, which runs from October 31 to February 24, 2025, the artist, 36, takes her sculptural practice even further, so far that it nearly circles back to the animation that birthed it: Hundreds of real, second-hand flip-flops simulate sounds that range from a cacophony of
noise to a symphony. Along with this installation, titled Sole crushing, Bennani debuts a feature art film directed with her dear friend and collaborator Barki over the past two years. For Aicha deals with queer identity and cultural and generational divides. It is also quite meta, as is common for projects by Bennani and Barki: a film about a film within a film. Produced by Fondazione Prada and set between fictional versions of New York and Casablanca, it is Bennani’s longest and most close-to-the-heart film yet, one that leans into a more narrative approach to storytelling, a break from the slice-of-life vignettes she is known for.

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In a political climate where chaos and uncertainty are quotidian, and war and civil unrest perpetual, both personal and collective catharsis become means of escape as much as a way forward for the two artists. This mutual approach to seeing the world began in a stutter of cultural differences for Bennani and Barki, who is from Israel. A shared sense of humor, love for nuance, and quest for the slippery thing called truth emerge strong and cosmic. Through a decade-long friendship and a pandemic spurred collaboration, they have developed a close bond, now finishing each other’s sentences and exchanging trusted, objective perspectives whenever the plot becomes too zoomed-in. Their distinct style of collaboration has crystallized into a personal approach to pertinent subject matter, voiced by the artists and those in their orbit and channeled through animal characters. Life shapes us, their work seems to say, but the forms reflected in their stories are uncanny and porous. They leave space for honesty to seep in. Truth, when shared, becomes something for everyone: a many-sided thing, it is mediated by past experiences and present dispositions. As Werner Herzog once said, “Facts do not convey truth. That’s a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.”

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Orian Barki: My first question is, where is the truth?

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Meriem Bennani: You mean in documentary and film? This is so unlike you to ask such an abstract thing.

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OB: I think it’s a nice way to start.

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MB: You and I both deal with this question in filmmaking a lot. We started working together because we have a similar take on how genre is limiting. We were both researching what feels right when you tell a story in relation to the idea of truth. There is this kind of discomfort in going too far in a certain direction, being super fictional or super non-fictional. Whenever we work on a film, the next scene always cancels out the one before by being self-conscious.

OB: Or self-aware.

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MB: We look for a bit of balance in everything, and what remains is our voice, reminding the viewer that we’re making the film. We’re looking for something and trying to be spontaneous, but not always explaining, Look, we’re acting spontaneous, because then you end up with something super self-conscious. It’s more always questioning every step: What are we doing? Why is this scene approached in this style? What does it do emotionally? Truth is this kind of constant research, being in touch and questioning. It’s not always comfortable, but it’s an exciting quest.

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OB: I think for me it’s...

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MB: I didn’t ask you the question!

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OB: I guess I chose the question because I wanted to answer it. I’ll talk about it in the context of our filmmaking. So we are working on a film, For Aicha. I think that the truth in our film is not so much in its information but in its honesty. It’s trying to find vulnerability. Someone can say something that is actually not true, but if they say it in a certain way that feels honest, then that’s what we’re looking for.

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MB: It’s not the words—it’s how they are shared.

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OB: Exactly. You can recognize if someone is being honest or not. And it’s not about truth versus lie. It’s about being vulnerable versus hiding.

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MB: I also think this idea of vulnerability is overrated, as if it’s super sacred. This idea of chasing vulnerability is how we end up with abusive or shitty reality T.V. documentaries.

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OB: But are they being vulnerable? Reality T.V. is all about content.

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MB: It’s also about trying to break people...about trying to find the cracks, to crack people open so that there’s this magical juice that comes out of it that is pure documentary filmmaking gold. When any value becomes too important and sought after, I’m cautious about it.

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OB: I don’t think that being vulnerable is necessarily only talking about painful stuff. There is vulnerability in everyday activities. There’s vulnerability in subtle desires, or sometimes these subtle desires can reflect deeper desires.

MB: Our movie is animated, and it has anthropomorphic animals. They are 3-D, and then the backgrounds are a mix of 3-D scans, like photogrammetry, which is a process for scanning reality in 3-D sets.

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OB: It’s so cool and easy to do on an iPhone. If you’re a nerd, look it up.

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MB: And the story...

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OB: Is personal.

MB: The story is about this North African jackal. With For Aicha, a lot of work is trying to make the characters feel super grounded—then you’re like, “Wait, I’m watching animals.” At the end of the day, this is a coyote, acting like a human. She’s strong. She could destroy things; she has this extreme potential for rage. She could behave like an animal, and there’s this constant repression. There are two stories: One is that she’s a filmmaker, and she’s trying to make a movie about her relationship with her parents, more specifically the process of discussing her queerness and understanding each other through conversation. She has all these difficult conversations with her mom that help her as she writes her film. The conversations are highly fictionalized but are based on our own experiences, and also, to be more precise, conversations that I’ve had with my mom. So there is a nonfiction aspect. We love translating nonfiction into animation.

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OB: Love.

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MB: The second story is that you’re watching the movie that she’s writing about this fictional double of herself and of her mom at the same time as you are watching her struggle to write the movie. It takes place between these semi-abstracted versions of New York, where she lives, and a Frankensteined version of Casablanca and Rabat in Morocco, where she visits her family. So maybe now we should talk about how we even got to work on this. What makes you want to make a film?

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OB: I enjoy just documenting a scene. I get interested in anything. I would say my style is kind of witty, poetic, romantic?

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MB: That’s true.

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OB: That’s a thread in my films. I like to make character-driven stories because I get interested in the characters and their psychology.

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MB: How do you feel about calling real people characters?

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OB: They are characters in the film.

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MB: I agree. I always catch myself saying character and...

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OB: Maybe people call them subjects?

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MB: That’s not cool. I feel like at least a character has a space to just be, and they’re not subjected to this narrative.

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OB: Yes. It’s not the real person in the film; they become a character and perform. In the first film I made, I was the main character. It was a documentary made out of diary footage. I had to separate myself from things that I knew about my life and the chronology to be able to make it into a good story. I needed to become a character, and this character ended up being kind of different from who I am in real life.

MB: What does it look like to be alive? Because of this exhibition, and thinking about animation so much, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I’ve been thinking about politics every day, too, and Palestine.

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OB: It’s the only thing that is possible to think of. Everything else is just an invert of what’s happening in Palestine right now. Everything else is trying, just for a second, to get your mind off of that, and it’s so fucking weird to be from there and be away. I’m against everything that Israel has been doing and is doing right now. It’s so sad.

“The accumulation of frustration of everyday life in a political state creates a condition that makes you want to release emotions in entertainment or protest.”
— Meriem Bennani

MB: Do you have an unrealized project? Being from Israel, do you want to make work about this?

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OB: I want to make something about it once we’re done with working on our film. I write about it, but just for myself, to be able to process it a little bit. This war started last October, but it’s been ongoing for so long, the occupation and the apartheid, and now it’s at this boiling point. I don’t even know where it’s leading, but it’s so dark. I’m interested in your experience of making such a personal story. You always film your family, but you’ve never made something that is about you.

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MB: Directly about me, yeah. I mean, I don’t want to say this is only about me. It’s a fictionalized combination of a lot of different things.

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OB: But it’s more of a personal subject.

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MB: Yes.

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OB: Well, how does it feel?

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MB: I have very cliché answers because it’s so close to me. Sometimes I don’t know what’s good or bad. I can’t fully make myself into a character, take distance, forget about reality, and look at myself through a story structure. That’s why it’s amazing that we’re collaborating. That’s one of the million reasons. There are moments—and I’m a pretty controlling person—where I’ve been like, “You decide.” I’m learning to let go. Then on the opposite side of things, it’s amazing because we both have endless ideas.

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OB: And we’re very available.

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MB: The actor is always available and costs nothing. When it comes to the portrayal of my family, or this version of family, and also of Morocco, I feel more responsible or self-aware about always prioritizing nuance. But it also comes down to our style: a lot of scenes of everyday life, where we just spend time with someone. This time because it’s a longer story, we were confronted with the limits of nuance.

OB: Right!

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MB: Because we usually do these short stories that are based on nuance. And now we needed a bit of a stronger storyline to carry a longer narrative. Sometimes you can just go for it: You don’t have to be so nuanced. That’s been a learning curve for us. But then at the end we still chose nuance, I think.

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OB: With For Aicha, it was different because the story wasn’t happening in real time. So it wasn’t us looking around and synthesizing whatever was happening. We were really thinking about something bigger, something that happens over the course of years, and choosing the moments that we want to include.

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MB: What’s been amazing for me is finding out that I love making sculptures and objects, which I think I wouldn’t have had the confidence to think of without going through video. [In “For My Best Family,”] I’m also doing a full sculptural installation without video. It’s a very large scale installation with hundreds of second-hand flip-flops basically clapping out of sync, like a giant instrument that generates moments of collective catharsis. It will fluctuate between chaos—almost something that sounds like a riot—into organized sequences of music, like a giant orchestra. The sound sequences draw from rhythms of drum ceremonies in Marrakesh. It is related to animation, how objects have a life, and the negative space of all the imaginary people wearing the shoes. It’s also taking one of the cheapest objects of fashion to create something that can feel so big. It’s not specific. I think it’s really about society, honestly, this idea of multiplicity, the communal, the collective. While the story of the film is more so about one person, there’s something that operates at a different scale with the installation, an abstracted feeling and a musical moment that is performed in a bit of an absurd way. It takes you out of everyday life. These moments that are bigger than us allow us to let go. That’s why I keep saying cathartic: the accumulation of frustration of everyday life in a political state creates a condition that makes you want to release emotions in entertainment or protest.

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OB: I remember when I was little my grandma took me to this musical. What impressed me most about it was that, after the final song, everyone started clapping at the same time, and I was looking around, amazed. I asked my grandma, “How does everyone know how to do it at the same time?”

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MB: It’s these moments of almost utopia where we know how to be together. It’s an alternative to a hierarchical structure to things. It’s a very horizontal moment.

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OB: A horizontal moment. That’s beautiful.