Weightlessness: a moment of grace and lightness, where we float and defy the laws of physics. But it’s also a moment of expectation: our slow-motion movements impose their rhythm on us, exhausting us.
While exploring the complexity and challenge of managing emotions in adulthood, Soumaya Nakouri returns to a childlike grammar, associating six emotions in a children’s manual with a fixed color code: serenity, anger, fear, joy, love and sadness. And like a return to primary colors, which can then be used to create a palette of infinite hues, Nakouri’s works are alternately wise and mischievous, reflecting the emotional kaleidoscope that shapes our lives…
But above all, in this exhibition, weightlessness isn’t just a suspended moment: it’s a whole chronology of learning, showing the methodical – and no doubt sometimes a little desperate – attempts to reach an emotional ideal that is external to us and sometimes seems precisely out of our reach. Until we finally understand that we must aim not for the derisory philosophical ideal of ataraxia, nor for a mastery – understood as pure domestication – of feelings, but for a sensitive balance: that of a daily negotiation with our emotions, whatever they may be, to finally achieve a serenity full of contrasts and balances.