Poetics of the political.

Drawing could be taken for something fragile. Graphite would be delicate, frail, a project’s pre-liminary state; suited for the draft, the sketch, the outline. This would not account for Massinissa Selmani’s determination. Because humility does not mean renunciation or the absence of resolu-tion. Quite the contrary. Selmani’s trajectory, as it appears to us hereafter, reveals precisely the opposite: the apparent modesty of the means implemented gives birth to unprecedented power, in which the practice is not confined to its own immediacy, but is enriched by the explo-sive ties that she weaves between the before, the after, the exterior, all these « outsides » of an artwork which eventually end up being invol-ved, as a constitutive outside, a layering.

In this sense, to immerse oneself into Massinissa Selmani’s work, one of his pieces

Untitled photograph (2012, p.83) could be read as a programmatic self-portrait (which it isn’t, or not only): the diver in the sink, where the false optical illusion, the relationship between both techniques - drawing and photography - raise the idea of a projection, a missed animation. The high flight, or the artwork in construction, through drawing, between the moment of diving and landing in the sink. Between three worlds, drawing, reality triggered by photography and our eyes. The invisible piece, present through its limits. A hybrid device, a mix. The human being reduced to a white line within the world surrounding him, and its omnipresent colour. A domestic, intimate dimension (the sink) but that is also external, social (the chalkboard, school); poetic as much as political (the diver).

Beyond this slightly reductive paraphrase,