Temps Mort

Temps Mort gathers eight months of exchanges between the French-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa and his friend Al, an inmate, conducted entirely by SMS and MMS on a phone smuggled into the prison where Al was held.

Bourouissa gave Al framing and shooting instructions by text, and Al photographed his surroundings on the phone's low-resolution camera and sent the results back, alongside ordinary text messages that trace the two men's evolving dialogue. The phone was Al's only tie to the world outside. The book collects 21 of these images and message exchanges, punctuated by blank pages marked only with dates, stretching the reader's sense of time the way incarceration stretches it for the person living inside it. It retraces the origin of Bourouissa's better-known 2009 video and photo project of the same name (its title borrowed from a track by the rapper Booba, and first developed as a film during his studies at Le Fresnoy), reconstructing the earlier, image-and-text collaboration the later project grew from. Études Studio published the book with the kamel mennour gallery in Paris in January 2014: a 140-page, full-color offset softcover in an edition of 1000, with text by Magali Jauffret, in English and French.

Bourouissa (b. 1978, Blida, Algeria; based in Paris) is known for staged and collaborative photographic and video projects that examine social marginalization, incarceration, and the built environments of the French banlieues, including the series Périphérique. Temps Mort's remote, improvised, camera-smuggled method extends that interest into a direct collaboration with someone the state had physically removed from view, using surveillance-grade image quality to document a life the prison system otherwise keeps unseen.