Abdel Karim Ougri
mar-HB4
a cura di Giovanni Rendina
Karim Abdel Ougri, AÏT, 2025. Qraqeb, stepper motor programmed with Arduino, steel cable, blue-back print, glass plate, adhesive stars, environmental dimensions. Ph Giorgio Chiantese
"My ship will sink, but my fame is like thunder, and my footsteps are like the sound made by flying magicians.
Tudududu."
Abdel Karim Ougri’s project for Una Boccata d’Arte 2026 in Ficulle brings together sculpture and performance, reflecting on the construction of contemporary myths tied to migration across the Mediterranean. A bumper car transformed into an extraterrestrial wreck bursts into the village landscape, opening a rupture within everyday life. Around this presence, the space is activated through performative and installation-based interventions, giving shape to a dispersed narrative.
A performer embodies the sole passenger: a liminal, migrant figure suspended between the postcolonial Mediterranean, European peripheries, and diasporic memories. Sound and rhythm function as devices of activation, triggering movements that oscillate between agency and constraint. What emerges is an unstable mythology in which the journey becomes a perpetual landing, and identity is constructed through progressive collisions with otherness.
The title mar-HB4 refers to the Arabic word marhab, a colloquial greeting reworked to resemble the code of an astronomical stellar catalog. In this way, the work transforms a marginal space into a field of symbolic imagination, questioning the possibility of new contemporary imaginaries.
Thanks to: Regione Umbria, Municipality of Ficulle, Mayor Gian Luigi Maravalle, Deputy Mayor Paola Federica Tarducci, Alexis Supervielle.
Abdel Karim Ougri (Pesaro, Italy, 1998) lives and works between Italy and Morocco. He trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Urbino and Turin. His research explores themes of identity, origin, and processes of belonging, examining memory as a critical tool and the body as a cultural archive. Through an anthropological and postcolonial lens, he investigates the tensions between cultural roots and self-transformation, as well as between individual and collective dimensions, questioning and challenging the boundaries between autobiography and historical narrative.
Giovanni Rendina is an independent researcher and curator. In 2023, he was a visiting research fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. He has curated exhibitions for Palermo Italian Capital of Culture, Art City Bologna, Live Arts Week Bologna, and Gelateria Sogni di Ghiaccio. In 2019, he won the sixth edition of the Italian Council. He earned a PhD from the University of Molise and a Master’s degree in Curating and Collections at Chelsea College of Arts in London. In 2024, he published the book Arte contemporanea. Un approccio radicale as part of the Eterotopie series by Mimesis. For Una Boccata d’Arte in Umbria, he curated projects by Ode de Kort in Otricoli (2024), Qeu Meparshivili in Citerna (2025).
Ficulle is an Umbrian village perched between Orvieto and the Valdichiana, where the hilly landscape engages in dialogue with medieval walls and stone alleyways. Its identity stems from a balance between memory and everyday life: the compact urban layout, the fortress, the churches, and the Etruscan traces tell an ancient story that still lives on in local traditions and community festivals. A land of craftsmanship and manual skill, it preserves knowledge tied to terracotta and the working of local materials. Culture intertwines with a simple and authentic gastronomy, made of olive oil, wine, and rural flavors—an expression of a territory that is both modest and generous.