Liberated Imaginaries. The syncretic work of Rachid Koraïchi between hybridizations and resignifications

Abstract

In every culture there are flows of images and ‘imaginaries’ that belong to the collection of local cultural symbols and are created over time. In this increasingly interconnected and globalised world, cultural influences happen at a faster rate, and symbols are mutant, hybrid and syncretic. Rachid Koraïchi, algerian sufi artist, defines himself as a nomad. He is a man suspended between worlds: an in-between, a man in transit, between the north and the south of the Mediterranean, between east and west, between the ancient and the modern. His family name El Koraïchi, whose genealogy dates back to the Quraish tribe, a tribe to which the prophet Muhammad himself belonged, is from an ancient Sufi family. His artistic research intertwines the weave of visual art with Sufi mysticism in a process of rediscovering memory—a living, reinterpreted memory. The imaginary, receptacle of the stereotypes of the colonizers, is liberated through his art, which is inspired by calligraphy and frees symbols and concepts to recreate an "alphabet of the memory". The connections with the past that shape his work are syncretic, linked with themes of deconstruction of colonial discourse, presenting a critique of the dominant European narrative in which Islamic roots have been forgotten.