Mohammed El Hajoui

For his month-long takeover of the room, from October 1st till 31st, Mohammed will develop Innesto, a new body of work exploring absence through two architectural references in Venice and Rabat.

 

Innesto

(Artist's statement)

In the historic centre of the city, the presence of a fully established mosque has never taken root. The issue became particularly visible in 2015, when artist Christoph Büchel temporarily transformed the former church of Santa Maria della Misericordia into a mosque as part of the Venice Biennale.

The intervention, titled The Mosque, made physically present, albeit for a brief period, something that had never found a stable architectural form in the city. The installation was subsequently closed by the authorities.

This attempt, which remained temporary and never developed into a permanent form, prompted a reflection in me and led me to draw a parallel with another unfinished architectural site: the Hassan Tower in Rabat, Morocco, part of a mosque that was never completed following the death of the sultan. The architecture of the complex is characterised by a strong openness towards the sky and a pronounced sense of directionality.

The two places represent two different forms of absence. In Venice, a mosque existed temporarily through the transformation of an existing space; in Rabat, a mosque was designed and begun but never completed. In both cases, a condition of instability emerges.

The project does not seek to reconstruct what is missing, but rather to give form to absence and make it visible.

From this perspective, the work takes the form of the threshold, an element that recurs throughout my artistic research. This is explored through the combination of architectural elements associated with the unfinished mosque in Rabat with geometric and decorative motifs referring to the former church of Santa Maria della Misericordia and to Venetian architecture.

The work develops through a series of panels created through processes of layering, overlapping and subtraction, using primarily paper and cardboard painted black. Through incision, cutting and décollage, the cut becomes simultaneously a destructive and constructive gesture: by removing material, it opens up new spaces and creates new possibilities for relationships between the different surfaces.

29 September 2026