Why Artist Meriem Bennani’s Wildly Popular Videos About Two Chill Lizards Perfectly Captures the Weirdness of Our New Reality

Two lizards are discussing the lockdown. “In a fucked up way,
I’m loving this,” says one. The other replies: “That is
such a quarantine week one thing to say.” The pair gazes
on as various fauna play instruments from the isolation of their
windows, fire escapes, and rooftops while the sun sets over New
York. The lizards start to shimmy.

Amid all the online chatter and digital content percolating in
the past six weeks, artist Meriem Bennani and filmmaker Orian Barki
have bubbled to the top with their languid pair of locked-down
artist-reptiles who cruise around Brooklyn, grooving to
balcony-based musicians or lazing in bed on Zoom, just trying to
exist in this extraordinary time, much like the rest of us. The two
creators were not quite expecting their micro-series, plainly
called 2 Lizards, to go totally viral.

“We are spending a lot of the confinement together, but we
wanted to do something outside of our worlds,” says Bennani,
speaking on the phone from her home in Brooklyn. “It’s kind of like
playing, which we have space for now because things are slower,
because things are less goal-oriented.”

The diaristic collaboration
between Barki and Bennani began mid-March as a response to the
pandemic. Each episode—there are four, and more to come—digests the
mood of the week, be it is the onset of new feelings or self-care
goals, or Dr. Fauci, embodied as a snake, urging
caution. It isn’t hard
to identify with the small reptiles, who are deeply concerned,
somewhat ill-informed, and paralyzed in the face of cataclysmic
social shifts. 

The lizards’ tone is breezy, but the series is also empathetic
to the pandemic’s heart-wrenching nuances. The most recent episode
sees the lizards visit a feline
health care worker (personified by their friend Cady Chaplin, who
is a nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital). The discussion is casual but
somber. The cat says she had to hold the phone to a patient’s
ear so he could receive a call from his wife: “All she could do is
listen, probably to the ventilator,” the cat recalls. It’s a
searing image.

A moment later, she adds, “this
pandemic has made me way cooler than I really am.”

The 3D-renderings of animals are set against real footage, while
the micro-plots in each episode blend fact and fiction. They echo
the rumor mills of social media, where the reality of the pandemic
exists for many solely in the form of media reports.

“It is factually a bit crazy that this virus has taken over the
whole world,” Bennani tells me. “When you are, unlike essential
workers, in confinement, you have to make up for the lack of
information and direct contact with the reality of this virus. We
are all imagining a lot of things, and everything is being narrated
to us. We then have to decide whether to believe it or not and make
up what is in-between.”

Constructing New Narratives

Life under lockdown did not require much of a shift for Bennani.
Her Brooklyn apartment already doubles as her studio, where she
doodles prototypes for her cartoonish sculptures (which look a bit
like fair rides), records and edits her speculative documentary
films, and updates her crafty social media posts, which function as
her scratchpad.

While 2 Lizards is a joint project with Barki, the
video series exemplifies Bennani’s typical way of being both
humorous, sympathetic, and forthright. Her acclaimed 2018 video
installation Party on the
Caps—featuring a cast of her family and friends living on
an island of diasporic immigrants who failed to teleport to
America—cemented her status as a leading voice of a millennial
generation of time-based artists. Her video art is funny without
being ironic, and she has a knack for making incisive commentary
about our present and near future.

Before 2 Lizards, all
of Bennani’s films were made in Morocco, her birthplace. When her
family members appear, they ad lib most of the script. That
decision gives the artist’s work a distinctly documentary-like
feeling, despite the surreal events often happening.

“The process of my work starts
off like the making of a documentary, but then I construct a
narrative afterward,” she says. “This is what happens in
documentaries anyways, I am just transparent about it and I don’t
try to make it look realistic like documentary filmmakers
do.”

Animals, including a fly, donkey, and crocodile, have stood in
as narrators to guide the plots. (She tends to pick rather
unglorious creatures.) They are disarming, as are her
installations, which often invite you to peer into balloon-like
binoculars or sit on small glowing stools. For the 2019 Whitney
Biennial, Bennani had made several sculptures that you sit in or
peer into to watch videos. One featured a fabricated reality TV
show about teenagers in Rabat.

Navigating Boundaries

For now, a lot of Bennani’s upcoming projects feel
tentative. This summer, she’s
among the commissioned artists to make a new work for the
international terminal of LAX airport. The video is still in the
works, but the plan is that it will be voice-activated by the
airport’s public service announcements.

It also may be some time before she can get back to her
preferred filmic backdrops in North Africa, not to mention her
family and friends there. If we’re lucky, Barki and Bennani’s
lizards will stride through the meantime with us, cataloguing this
strange new reality with empathy and direly needed jokes.

And perhaps there will be another installment of Party
on the Caps, which, it turns out, is actually one
part of a trilogy. The second chapter has long been set to take
place in a digital space through completely remote, on-screen
interactions.

“Maybe now is the perfect time to shoot it,” she says. “I
would not consciously root it in coronavirus, but boundaries
between nations and people feels very real right now. We have to
redefine and reshape tenderness and care in digital ways.”

The post Why Artist Meriem Bennani’s Wildly Popular Videos
About Two Chill Lizards Perfectly Captures the Weirdness of Our New
Reality appeared first on artnet News.