LATIFA ECHAKHCH is a Moroccan-French visual artist currently based in the Swiss cities of Martigny and Vevey. She is known for a startling body of paintings, sculptures, and installations that explore the cascading, multitudinous meanings of everyday materials, examining themes including migration, conflict, and memory. Born in El Khnansa in 1974, Echakhch and her family relocated to France when she was three. She attended the École supérieure d’Art de Grenoble and later received degrees from the National School of Arts Cergy-Pontoise and the Lyon National School of Fine Arts, and began her studio practice in 2001. In 2007, Le Magasin in Grenoble presented her first solo museum exhibition, which included her defining early installation À chaque stencil une revolution (For Each Stencil a Revolution). With a title borrowed from a comment by Palestinian resistance leader Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) on the May 1968 French student uprisings, the piece tiles dyed carbon paper, a common medium of 1960s leaflets, throughout the room, treated with alcohol that causes the blue ink to lift, drip, and pool on the floor—an elegy for a revolutionary moment and a wink to Yves Klein. In other works, she has similarly repurposed charged materials, including a partially felled theater canvas, its lower half crumpled out onto the gallery floor (La dépossession, 2014); the diacritic markings left over from erased Arabic poetry (Noise and Missing Words, 2014); and—in a 2022 collaborative exhibition with photographer Zineb Sedira at the Kunsthaus Baselland—assorted objects like wineglasses, cigarette packs, discarded running sneakers, and LPs (including Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom and Brian Eno’s Another Green World).
Throughout her work, Echakhch has explored the role of sound as a social practice, citing composers such as Alvin Curran, Ryoji Ikeda, and Terre Thaemliz as an influence. Chosen to represent Switzerland at the 59th Venice Biennale, Echakhch explicitly took up musical aesthetics, enlisting percussionist Alexandre Babel and curator and former DJ Francesco Stocchi. “Music is more directly linked to the idea of time passing,” she has said. “You can feel it in your body. When you share a painting or sculpture, you see the world around you and you give it back through your artwork. This process of sharing music is much more immediate.” In the resulting pavilion, titled The Concert (2022), humanoid sculptures evoking fire rituals and folk customs, made from recycled material from previous biennales, filled a darkened room illuminated like a glowing ember by Babel’s contribution, a percussive score delivered in light rather than sound. Echakhch’s long-standing interest in time, memory, and change—arcing between the political and the everyday—here finds a center of gravity in cycles of destruction and rebirth. At Art Basel in 2023, her fascination with sonic catharsis bloomed into deconstructed stage plot with rotating performances co-curated with La Becque residency director Luc Meier, featuring artists such as Curran, Leila Bourdreil, Oren Ambarchi, Rhys Chatham, and Robert Longo. For Echakhch, these recent projects bridging visual and ephemeral art have confirmed an invigorating, cross-disciplinary kinship. “The things I put on display in my installations are a polyphonic weave of feelings that could be contradictory: joy, sadness, expectation, disappointment – all very common,” she says. “This possibility of direct emotional experience is something music offers: emotions are transferred and felt as a kind of endless braid.”