Hicham Berrada initiated the Présage (“Omen”) series in 2007. These filmed performances capture and project, in real time, the chemical reactions he conducts in a beaker, using a transmission and magnification apparatus commonly found in scientific research. Despite their seemingly random appearance, the Présages are far from improvised: each requires around a hundred preliminary tests, repeated under similar conditions with only one variable changed at a time. The dates and times included in the titles function as a form of documentation—for example, Présage 11-10-2013_7h36. This “knowledge bank” informs the final selection of eight to ten substances that together form each aquatic landscape. Beginning in 2013, Berrada occasionally began transposing them into wall-mounted tanks: small, tableau-like pieces where chemical formations emerge in layers of depth (Tranches [Slices], begun in 2007).

Released like meteorites or scattered like snowflakes, the substances Berrada selects form, within minutes, filaments, corals, stalagmites, or ectoplasms, whose expansion, suspension, and texture are carefully choreographed. These visions, at once surreal and hyper-concrete, echo the visual wonder sparked in the early twentieth century by scientific cinema and its technical revolutions. Slow motion, time-lapse, microcinematography, and underwater filming revealed dimensions of reality never before seen. [1] Berrada’s films inherit the lateral lighting and black backgrounds used by Jean Comandon in his microcinematographic work of the 1910s, where microorganisms appear like a “star-filled sky”. [2] The Présages play on this spatial ambiguity—their scale could just as easily be microscopic as cosmic.

Hélène Meisel, 2020

Translated by Laurie Hurwitz

[1] Maria Ida Bernabei, “Trois archives : films scientifiques et histoires de décontextualisation,” Museologia & Interdisciplinaridade 8, no. 15 (January–July 2019): pp. 49–71.

[2] Paul Gastou, L’ultra-microscope dans le diagnostic clinique et les recherches de laboratoire (Paris: Baillière et Fils, 1910), p. 9.