La salle de classe

Everything takes place in the classroom of Hicham Benohoud, an art teacher in Marrakech. Before entering the classroom, the teacher made sketches of situations that he imagines he could stage in his workspace. One of the rules is that he will not introduce external elements, the other is that his students will serve him as extras without him choosing them for a particular aspect of their physique or for any other sentimental reason. During the shooting the other students will continue to work at their table.

From this perfectly strange device - and perceived as such by young men and women - was born a series of singular, unique photographs that resemble nothing else. They set up and impose a mysterious world, with a heavy atmosphere marked by the haunting presence of the suspended lamp, a flying saucer that illuminates the scene while threatening to suffocate it. Wires, sticky tapes, fabrics, cardboard and boards are enough to impose a mental world of which we are quite unable to say if it visualizes the inner universe of the one who is installed in "deus ex machina" behind the lens or the fantasy of the children. The most obvious photographic part of Hicham Benohoud's work is in perfect harmony with all the pictorial creations - the most disturbing of which integrate photography - or installations by which he questions identity through a thousand portrait modalities that firmly and calmly express his unease about his situation, his culture, his country.
Christian Caujolle