© photos: Doris Margarete Schmidt
CGI – THE COFFEE GROUNDS INDEX
A Multimedia Performance on the Jemaa el-Fnaa in front of Bank al Maghrib | 2014
5th Marrakech Biennial
Curator: Hicham Khalidi, Khalid Tamer
SYNOPSIS
The Coffee Grounds Index (CGI) is a response to the countless indices predicated on a flat overview of the world used to sort it into handy hierarchies. YOVO! YOVO! proposes a contrasting vision of the world that is imaginative and which relies on predictive perception rather than on striated reality. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s proposition that a philosophy which does not include and cannot explain the possibility of prophecy by means of coffee grounds, cannot be a true philosophy. For this project, persons working on Jamaa El Fna and in the touristic sector interpret the forms of coffee grounds. They form a halqa.
On February 27 2014 their results are pronounced aloud, announcing the future of all declared states of the world. A painter from the place worked on round flags on the bottom of the glasses. Once the glasses turned, they suppose a variable rearrangement of indications. Continuing the tradition of Moroccan storytellers on Jamaa El Fna square, the reading out of the CGI is a singular, unrepeatable performance. Over the following ten days a guide returns to the square each day to report CGI’s global prognosis, thereby catalysing an act of speech into a decentralized rumor. This site-specific intervention for the 5th Marrakech Biennial advances in areas that remain undefined to us, turning out mystery and the absurd, and revealing their voids. It is from these areas that the new can arise and adventure becomes possible.
SHOWS
pronouncement: 27th february 2014 5pm – 22pm
reporting: 28th february to 9th march 6pm – 7pm
> CATALOGUE MARRAKECH BIENNALE
