the political nourishes Selmani’s work, and is somehow the foundation of it. The place of the individual within the collective, the human being facing politics, history, violence. In 1000 Villages, socialist abstraction is re-read in this tension between the individual, his fragility, that of his drawings and the terrifying outrageous-ness of the projects that are thought for him, in his stead. The pupil’s notebook The Future, el Mustaqbal, ceases to be a propaganda tool, a means to form the human clogs of the totalita-rian project, and becomes, through the artist’s gesture, the contestation tool of its re-reading and re-writing in prospect. Similarly, L'insistance du peuple or Relevés du dehors, reproducing and juxtaposing current events, reveal in the most cruel way the human being’s double hel-plessness in the 21st century: whether the subject or the object of images, he is both crushed and

invented by the media machinery. The human being exists from the moment he disappears wit-hin the absurd flow of current events.

This paradox of humanism is without doubt the most burning issue raised by Massinissa Selmani. Just like in Souvenir du vide, we seek to inform our decay as well as to move away from it; in doing so, we are the masters and the victims of illusion. Through the strength of drawing’s fragi-lity, the rigged installation - between projection, layering and static drawings - blurs the bounda-ries between reality and imagination, theoretical interrogation and esthetic enjoyment. Doubly mediatised, our existence is both incertain and terribly present.

The toy of a poetics of realism much more than of a poetical realism.

Translation, Callisto Mc Nulty