Interior Voyage

When I was young, I dreamed of being a sailor in order to travel around the world. Today I am not a sailor but an artist, and the motif of the rowboat symbolizes for me the voyage and the return to self.

In 2005, the artist decides to dedicate an exhibition, which he titles Markib (rowboat in Arabic) to this subject at Espace Le Cube in Rabat. Five drawings and one installation are presented. The installation is made with ninety-nine small rowboats on tracing paper enclose a luminous green light. Suspended from the ceiling in a circle, the rowboats form a floating halo illuminating the space with their green light.

Younès Rahmoun declares:

Here, the boats represent human beings, each fulfilling his role but all oriented towards a center, as though connected to a single source of life. For me it is about the symbolic referring to a greater power that governs us. I believe that we do not decide at all what we do. We do not choose to be born or to die, for example. The series of five drawings which complete the installation retrace a star that mutates into a boat, the progressive erasure of physical man to the benefit of the spiritual being. The multicolored points connected to the central form by silver threads are like so many paths leading to our ultimate and profound truth.

In 2005, the artist creates another installation, Safina (boat in Arabic) and yet another in 2006, for the Algesiras port in Spain. There, ninety-nine rowboats are arranged in two concentric circles on a vertical wooden plank. The group recalls the flower motif in traditional Arab-Muslim mosaics. For the artist, the installation’s ninety-nine boats correspond to a group of people meditating in unison, absorbed in a collective and spiritual activity.