I remember seeing Mounat Charrat’s work when I arrived in Morocco, around 2010. This first impression was based on his anti-gravity paintings, the stagings—monochrome and large format—of rocks suspended in a spatial void. The worked surfaces reveal cracks, so many signs of strength in fragility, healed wounds, fragments reconstituted like pieces of a puzzle. His work certainly has a metaphysical aspect, but his material exploration is of a tactile nature. This is precisely what appeals to me in Mounat’s work: this intersection of mental and speculative exercise that intertwines with bodily expression, gesture.

I have been fortunate to have come to know the artist over the past decade; so my understanding of his process has evolved alongside his own process of experimentation and discovery. Hours, years of conversation have revealed his fascination with science, space, gravity and meteorites; then his own archaeology, his lineages, his cumulative nationalities and geographies. The areas of convergence between instinct, the surrounding matter, the intimate detail.

Although introspection is a common—if not the primary—source of the creative act, it is often, behind the scenes, a natural process that has another goal. For Mounat Charrat, the process reveals the intention; she relies on her body to sort through the memorabilia so that the mind does not interfere.

The title of this exhibition refers to a time capsule, which Mounat Charrat describes as “a short-circuit of the past-present-future; of what already exists, at this very moment, then projected into the future.” The works are finished, but their presence and meanings are ongoing and interactive, each informing the other and assuming other contexts in interaction with the viewer. In the text of one installation, for example, the artist confides in the viewer: “He asked me where do you come from.” Indeed, the artist’s particular details are multicultural, sculpted by histories and territorial oppositions. Her grandparents—an Amazigh resistance fighter, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War in France, a Riffian tribal chief—are all characters from a Tolstoy novel, ennobled by their destinies forged by time and place. She is Moroccan, but also Spanish, Amazigh, French. How can she assimilate the heritage of her ancestors and their experiences, so different are they from her own life?

Going beyond the surface to reveal something deeper: a play within a play. It is also interesting to note that Charrat’s works are very material; they are layers, accumulations of substance, anchored in solid matter. Stone is a tensor device that defies the laws of gravity; a compression piece that encapsulates time through applied energy, and that consolidates or fuses multiple histories into hardness, as hard as stone. The dancing wooden “calligraphy” appears fleeting, light, like writing scribbled on a piece of paper. Now frozen in this natural material, suspended, majestic. An effect of density emerges from the scribbles – or smoulders beneath the surface.

There is something that smoulders, that veils itself, that sometimes emerges in all these works. Tiny railway tracks disappear into the stone or the clouds, branches emerge from the concrete, fragments of nature like a thought that brushes the tongue, a little out of reach...

From my conversations with the artist, and from contemplating her work, I would suggest that Charrat is not trying to compose her own time capsule; I would say that she is instead digging into the sedimentary layers, freeing the waste—of emotion, of language, of perceptions of the other—in search of the capsules that never saw the light of day.

Mounat Charrat sprinkles elements of play throughout her work, a few riddles—fights, even—tossed over her shoulder, with a smile and a wink to show us that she doesn’t take herself too seriously, that art is just a form of experimentation. There is also the frequent motif of stone in her work, to which she attributes quasi-human qualities. Between the games and the rocks, there is a deep sense of irony and ardor in her workshop-laboratory, where objects picked up at the side of the road and fragments of wreckage accumulate, now waiting for the moment when she will give them meaning. There is method in her extravagance.

She transforms things into something else, a luhà (Koranic tablet) becomes a mask, a piece of canvas is reborn as “a rock skin”. Here the game is serious, and her recent works are the work of a thoughtful artist searching for the meaning of things, and a connection to her own history. Some recent studies in the field of transgenerational epigenetic transmission shed new light on the evolution of behavior and individual experience that are transferred from one generation to the next. Here, in this new body of work, Charrat channels the messages received from her own ancestors, the bodily memory of her own genetic composition.

The materiality of her work is the physical manifestation of her research process. Building, then breaking down. Putting the stone together and then breaking it, to discover what it really contains. Does breaking something mean destroying it, creating something new, revealing its true nature? In this exercise, the artist aspires to a deeper understanding of her own choices of expression, and their influence on her genetic heritage (Rif Amazigh, Spain, Chleuh Amazigh, France), as well as the stifled artistic impulses of her ancestors. If she has been able to build a pictorial vocabulary throughout her career, at present she is reexamining it through the prism of inherited knowledge and bodily memory.

The second volume in Paul Auster’s series of autobiographical works, Excursions into the Inner Zone, contains a chapter that shares the title of this exhibition: “Time Capsule.” The darling of American authors describes his memories from childhood to adolescence, moments that have left a lasting impression on him—a film, a piece of music, a book—foreshadowing the man who would become him. From his lofty perch as a distinguished author at the height of his art, he revisits the moments that stand out from the rest; as a young man he could not imagine which would be formative and which would be forgotten. The mature artist culls fragments of meaning from his experience, giving substance to an a posteriori repertoire of evolution. Charrat undergoes the same ritual, drawing lessons not only from her own past but also from those who preceded it, composing a striking visual language to carry the torch of the unfulfilled creative energies of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. According to a theory by American historian Hayden White, history cannot exist in a vacuum, it can only be interpreted in a context of emplotment, or plotting. Mounat Charrat creates a very particular visual vocabulary to explore the fragments of life, to honor her exceptional female ancestry, and to project herself into her own future.