Visual Art
01.24.25
Meriem Bennani Jace Clayton

A show at the Fondazione Prada in Milan renders visceral
the pleasures of pure percussion.

Meriem Bennani: For My Best Family, installation view. Courtesy Fondazione Prada. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio. Pictured: Sole crushing, 2024.

Meriem Bennani: For My Best Family, Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Italy, through February 26, 2025

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Let’s start by asking the wrong questions: What is the theme of a drumbeat? What is a rhythm about? What does a percussion ensemble mean? The type of inquiry that applies to a film or artwork or song lyric doesn’t quite fit. Having spent most of my adult life mixing beats together—at high volume, for large crowds of people, blending music as a DJ—I have come to consider rhythm not as a question but as a calling. Not an individual’s vocational “calling” (although for me, it is that) but something that summons a gathering of people into existence and action. Electronic music innovates by restlessly slicing up time into exciting new drum patterns, yet rhythm is most special when performed in groups. Whether moving to the polyrhythmic intricacies of Senegambian mbalax or following the two-people-on-one-instrument clockwork of Basque txalaparta, submitting oneself to the brain-body reboot engendered by communal rhythm is revelatory. There are things to learn on every dance floor, but Morocco’s abundance of percussion has taught me the most. One of the main lessons I absorbed: responsibility, understood as rhythm, is shared among all players present and extends to everyone listening—responsibility to nothing more than occupying a common time and place from one instant to the next.

Meriem Bennani: For My Best Family, installation view. Courtesy Fondazione Prada. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio. Pictured: Sole crushing, 2024.

I can’t afford Prada. Their nonprofit art museum in Milan, designed by Rem Koolhaas’s architecture firm, is austere and unwelcoming. Yet to enter Fondazione Prada and experience Meriem Bennani’s fantastic exhibition, For My Best Family, is to be called to and invited in. The first thing one encounters, in the glass-walled main gallery, is Sole crushing (2024). In this entrancing installation, the Moroccan-born, Brooklyn-based artist has created a space that is pure percussion.

Meriem Bennani: For My Best Family, installation view. Courtesy Fondazione Prada. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio. Pictured: Sole crushing, 2024.

Every presentation of Bennani’s that I’ve seen has involved some form of whimsical-utilitarian seating, and Sole crushing is no exception. The audience can lounge on huge, fancy, curving couches, from which they can observe 192 flip-flops and slippers that tap, slap, and knock out an overwhelming, ever-changing rhythmic chorus. (One can also climb a pair of “observation decks” at the back of the installation to follow the proceedings from on high.) The shoes are mostly arrayed in a playful wooden roller coaster–style setup, with some occupying their own circular or spiraling stand. At times they hit individually, at times call-and-response motifs emerge among groups of footwear. Some moments accelerate and crescendo into orchestral density. (The score was composed in collaboration with Reda Senhaji, aka Cheb Runner.) Sole crushing’s immersive beat clatter sounds very, very good, and will elicit a range of responses: joy, exuberance, enervation, claustrophobia, catharsis, reverie, delirium, trance . . .

Pneumatic tubes snake throughout the supports and connect to hardware slipper-stand mounts that deliver bursts of air powering each clap. Sole crushing is an immense mechanical, unamplified acoustic instrument. A number of the shoes have bits of metal, plastic, or wood fastened to their tops or placed under their soles in order to alter the sounds they make. The artists spent time positioning them in the reflective room to ensure that the sound texture of individual rhythmic filigrees gels with the overall acoustic effect regardless of where one listens. The results are stunning. But what does it mean?

Meriem Bennani: For My Best Family, installation view. Courtesy Fondazione Prada. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio. Pictured: Sole crushing, 2024 (detail).

Sole crushing recalls the “mom-slipper slap” meme (“like when your mom is angry,” explained Bennani in a promo video, citing it as the initial inspiration, “kind of like a universal joke”). Flip-flops signify the global south generally, and the combination of flip-flops and slippers—especially the babouches—evokes Moroccan spaces both cozily domestic (many of Bennani’s films are set in such places) and brutally mercantile (it’s far easier to find cheap plastic imports than handcrafted leather slippers in the souks and malls). Cartoon scenes such as the marching brooms in Disney’s 1940 animated feature Fantasia come to mind, as do thoughts of networked AI and robotics. Yet the experience of being there is thrillingly visceral. The docents wear earplugs, because the sound engulfs. Sole crushing is loud, material, insistent. Inhabiting a shared groove is not easy. You don’t know what X struck by Y will sound like until you hear it. Rhythm is encounter, not identity. This is a percussive lesson.

Meriem Bennani: For My Best Family, installation view. Courtesy Fondazione Prada. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio. Pictured: Sole crushing, 2024.

Bennani’s Windy (2022), shown outdoors on Manhattan’s High Line, is a tornado made of foam that whirls furiously (think Looney Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil in action). I did not see this in person, but video documents people approaching the artwork then spinning in circles in a playful mimicry. What Windy brings into our world is less a sculptural form and more a momentum, a modulation, a force that began in cartoon-space and was ushered onto the High Line by Bennani, its infectious sense of play then leaping into the bodies of kids and adults who let themselves turn dervishly windy. To give spirit and support to—this Merriam-Webster definition of animate circulates throughout Bennani’s work. Humor and joie de vivre make her art fun. Its deployment in the areas of transition between fantasy/reality or online/meatspace is part of what makes it so approachable: the work finds us where we are—not in the room or stuck to the phone but flickering between all those spaces. Sole crushing manifests that interstitial existence, it does not “represent” or display it.

Meriem Bennani: For My Best Family, installation view. Courtesy Fondazione Prada. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio. Pictured: Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, For Aicha, 2024.

The way of looking this fosters is contagious. When one walks past the bar called Gecko 23 en route from the metro to Fondazione Prada, its name echoes Bennani and Orian Barki’s 2 Lizards, a widely lauded video series about anthropomorphic reptiles living through COVID-19 lockdown, which began on Bennani’s Instagram feed and ended up acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Similarly, the fox, mink, and beaver furs that I spotted visitors wearing in the gallery doubled as a creepy fun-house allusion to For Aicha (2024), the full-length animated feature by Bennani and Barki screening in Fondazione Prada’s upstairs gallery, populated by (living) versions of the same creatures.

Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, For Aicha, 2024 (still). Video, color, sound, 73 minutes. Courtesy Meriem Bennani, Orian Barki, John Michael Boling, and Jason Coombs.

After the extraordinary formal focus of Sole crushing, For Aicha presents a wide array of visual storytelling styles, combining live action with animation to strong effect, all wrapped in a pulse-quickening raï and gasba soundtrack (those unfamiliar with Cheikha Nedjma are in for a treat). The work’s metafictional elements get conveyed via text messages, video calls, visual and sonic puns, a play-within-a-film in which we learn that young animals dress up as vegetables for their school performance, pen-and-ink storyboarding of the scene being shown, and more. At the film’s start, Aicha, “a cardiologist jackal living in Casablanca,” receives a coming-out letter from her daughter, Bouchra, “a 35-year-old Moroccan jackal and filmmaker living in New York, as she writes an autobiographical film exploring how her queerness has impacted her mother.” (Bennani voices Bouchra and artist Yto Barrada voices Aicha.) Aicha says the revelation’s destabilizing impact left her unable to dance at a wedding—lacking ability to react to the power of percussion.

Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, For Aicha, 2024 (still). Video, color, sound, 73 minutes. Courtesy Meriem Bennani, Orian Barki, John Michael Boling, and Jason Coombs.

What happens when the drums hit yet the body fails to respond? “You know I’m always the first to dance. I didn’t move one bit,” says Aicha in that initial scene. Bouchra’s aunties take up bendir and taarija percussion in the film’s conclusion. For all the mixed-media wizardry and zoomorphic verve, For Aicha is a tender story of familial reconciliation. The jouissance of connection, across and despite screens and bodies and generations, lies at its heart. Figuring out how to move together, what that might sound like, despite everything, an end in itself, For My Best Family.

Jace Clayton is an artist and writer based in New York, also known for his work as DJ /rupture. Clayton is the author of Uproot: Travels in 21st Century Music and Digital Culture (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and is Director of Graduate Studies at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

A show at the Fondazione Prada in Milan renders visceral the pleasures of pure percussion.
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