EXHIBITION
„NEUE ERINNERUNGEN
(EL ARBI BOUQDIB ARCHIVE)“

Exhibition dates:
18th August – 5th October 2024, Saturday and Sunday, 3 PM – 8 PM

Exhibition and concert venue: Pumpwerk Berlin (Am Pumpwerk 4, 12524 Berlin)

Featuring new works by:

Sergey Bratkov, Elshan Ghasimi, Ben Greber, Markus Hoffmann, Michal Martychowiec, Patrick Panetta, Max Schaffer, Stark & Shakupa

Curated by Eleonora Frolov and JMH Schindele.

The El Arbi Bouqdib Archive (EBA) is an autopoietic and multi-author project. Nine artists create new works based on the legacy of Moroccan mathematician, poet, cyberpunk, and Quranic scholar El Arbi Bouqdib. These works are 'New Memories' of an unknown hermeticist.

Curator-guided tour with artist talks
On Sunday, 24 August 2024 and on Saturday, 21 September 2024, at 4 pm
Book a free ticket here

Concert
DUO Philipp Püschel and Elshan Ghasimi
On Sunday, 15 September 2024, at 5 pm
Book a free ticket here

El Arbi Bouqdib in the early 1970s: portrait of a young man in a striped shirt, on a film strip, black and white
El Arbi Bouqdib in 2013: elderly man with a beard and flat cap in a snowy park, rendered as a drawing

El Arbi Bouqdib Archive (EBA)

When El Arbi Bouqdib died in March 2016 in Bremen, he left boundless and yet to be measured secrets behind. In order to manage and structure his estate, the El Arbi Bouqdib Archive was founded in 2017. As part of Bublitz Thesaurós, its concern is to report on the life and work of Bouqdib.

The aim of the El Arbi Bouqdib Archives and all related artistic and curatorial activities is the poetic reconstruction of Bouqdib's life and the presentation, embedding and questioning of his research results, which have been produced over decades. This narrative and poetic form of reprocessing is the work of a growing number of different authors.

The multi-part exhibition cycle Elies Miniatures, begun in June 2018, and the concert exhibitions it contains, are the first poetic-hermeneutic approaches and first steps in the review and narrative of El Arbi Bouqdib.

El Arbi Bouqdib as a young man on a bench beneath palm trees, old sepia photograph
Two young men walking along a sunny street, one carrying a bag, old black-and-white photograph
Passport photo of the young El Arbi Bouqdib in a striped shirt on a strip of film
A group in white coats in a commercial kitchen with El Arbi Bouqdib in the middle, old colour photograph
El Arbi Bouqdib with a colleague in white coats in a laboratory, a gift with ribbons and a sign reading “Larbi”, old colour photograph
El Arbi Bouqdib as a young man in front of a wooden house with a fence, old sepia photograph
El Arbi Bouqdib in a jacket in front of a hospital building in sunlight, old colour photograph
El Arbi Bouqdib with curly hair in a denim jacket, holding a colourful object, old colour photograph
El Arbi Bouqdib sitting with a camera on a stool in a room full of books and papers, old colour photograph
El Arbi Bouqdib on a motorcycle in front of a building, old black-and-white photograph
El Arbi Bouqdib in a hat and coat beside a car on a country road, old colour photograph
El Arbi Bouqdib in a dark jacket by a fountain in a city, old colour photograph
Black-and-white portrait of the young El Arbi Bouqdib with curly hair
Family photo: El Arbi Bouqdib with four people in front of a fence in an autumn garden
El Arbi Bouqdib in sunglasses beside a woman holding a baby at a café table, old colour photograph
The older El Arbi Bouqdib in a flat cap and beard in a snowy park, black and white
In conversation with El Arbi Bouqdib in August 2015: two men sitting with a laptop in a garden
The older El Arbi Bouqdib in glasses and a cap solving a Rubik’s cube, black and white
A cluttered workshop with shelves, boxes and tools, black and white

About El Arbi Bouqdib

"I've always wished I had the gift, whenever it's raining,
of turning the rain into sunshine by means of explanations."

From one of E. Bouqdib's notebooks, 1987

When El Arbi Bouqdib passed away on 12th March 2016, he left behind countless secrets, as yet immeasurable in their significance.

Bouqdib devoted himself to a broad spectrum of different disciplines. He worked as a mathematician to solve Fermat's last theorem, wrote computer programmes, occupied himself with the physics of thinking, attempted to approach palmistry in a scientific way, worked on magical squares and even developed a theory of colours, amongst others. He was still working right up to his last hours, decrypting the great numerical code he considered to be in the Quran.

Bouqdib was born in Morocco in 1947. He came from a Sufi family and, from his early childhood onwards, was as fascinated by science as by its border phenomena. During an interview I conducted with him for "Bublitz" in August last year, he urged me to examine all his statements and set them in "the light of the sciences and falsification".

He moved to Europe at 19, living, studying and working in different towns and countries. During these young years, he could undoubtedly have been described as flamboyant. He wrote poems and stories, went motorbike racing, was a scientist and worked alongside Albert Hoffmann, the LSD researcher and chemist. However, during the last thirty years, which he spent in Germany, he became increasingly isolationistic and reclusive.

Bublitz has been granted access to a large, unordered collection of different materials. This consists of notebooks, photos, around a dozen books written by Bouqdib, but never published, hard drives and further documents.

The task now facing us is the archiving of these and, in dialogue with the family, the development of an appropriate form of presentation to convey the person, and in particular the work, of a scientist, researcher and mystic, but also, from the perspective of art, a meticulous Outsider artist. For this reason, the planned series of exhibitions on El Arbi Bouqdib will take place under the focus of Thesaurós.

JMH Schindele, Summer 2016

"I did not find the truth,
that's why I went to Europe.
Books were my masters."

El Arbi Bouqdib in his last Interview with JMH Schindele 24th - 29th August 2015