On the occasion of the eighth year of collaboration with ENSBA Lyon - École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation hosts the first solo exhibition in Italy of Tarek Lakhrissi, artist participating in the Post-Diplome 2020 promoted by ENSBA.

“This Doesn't Belong to Me” presents a cycle of new productions conceived by the artist specifically for the spaces of Palazzo Re Rebaudengo di Guarene (CN). The exhibition explores the concept of self-defense, understood as a practice of resistance that different social groups and subordinate bodies have developed to survive.The key image of the cycle of works is the salamander: since medieval bestiaries it is said that this amphibian is endowed with poison and can survive in the flames of fire. On display the salamander becomes the symbol of a political but also sexual counterpower which, in the exercise of self-defense, rewrites the codes of confrontation and encounter. Autotomy - the self-amputation of non-vital parts of the body, practiced by some animals as a diversion against their predators - becomes the defensive tactic identified by Lakhrissi to imagine new strategies of urban warfare.

The exhibition itinerary of “This Doesn't Belong to Me” develops from a ceiling installation made up of silver chains, protective talismans in everyday life, which also recall pleasure tools adopted in BDSM practices. The next room portrays a deferred scene in which the conflict or intercourse has already taken place. The space is populated by a group of five sculptures in the shape of a salamander's tail, grotesque and out of scale: they constitute a dreamlike scenario dominated in an evocative way by the element of fire. The environment reflects a tension between visibility and absence, it assumes the body not as an inalienable identity structure, but as a platform in continuous construction and deconstruction. The self-defense represented by Lakhrissi is a process of disidentification, that "strategy of survival and subversion" according to José Esteban Muñoz, but also and above all a counter-offensive action, similar to that described by Elsa Dorlin in her "Se défendre: une philosophie de la violence "(2018):" another semiology of the militant body that does not play on the exemplary nature of its martyrdom, but on the inexorable and inevitable nature of its revenge: which is not part of a metaphysics of ends but of immediacy of a strike ".