Noyyi, Wéyal Noyyi / Breath, Keep Breathing, a site-specific exhibition project created by Maïmouna Guerresi with the intention of engaging the public in a critical and reflective dialogue about contemporary art and the urgent issues it addresses.

Internationally represented by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, after the great success with important institutional exhibitions and less than a year after her solo exhibition A Spiritual and Political Journey at the Museo Ettore Fico in Turin, Maïmouna Guerresi arrives in Monferrato with an original project came up for Crescentina, the cultural center based in Fubine that supports and promotes exhibitions, installations and site-specific interventions of contemporary art.

The evocative title chosen by Guerresi, Breath, Keep Breathing – translated into the Wolof language Noyyi, Wéyal Noyyi – evoking the concept of perseverance is itself transformed into an exhortation, a message embodied by the women protagonists of the Artist’s work. Indeed, Maïmouna Guerresi, through a visual representation at once delicate and profound of the feminine, shows levitating bodies that refer to a feeling of suspension and elevation, as much physical as spiritual. The works created for the project also open up a deep social disapproval against Islamophobia and Afrophobia supported by the instrumental consideration of African Muslim communities as a social and economic danger in order to justify past and present colonizations.

The centerpiece of the Noyyi, Wéyal Noyyyi / Breath, Keep Breathing project is a steel architectural structure that evokes the image of the Minbar, the pulpit found in mosques from which sermons are delivered. Access to the Minbar is traditionally reserved to male imams and precluded to women. Revisiting its liturgical and ritual function, in the Minbar created by Guerresi for the exhibition the human figure is replaced by a fan that when operated, like a divine breath, moves golden bangs hanging from the front door. The

curtain of golden bangs was made from a thermal rescue blanket, cut into parallel strips. The faint rustle generated by them, like any discriminated voice, is destined to be ignored.