Viewing Meriem Bennani: For My Best Family

It’s Halloween – and this week we’re all about the supernatural and otherworldly shows. First up is a weirdly wonderful project by Meriem Bennani, the Moroccan artist’s largest to date. For My Best Family creates a spooky atmosphere over two floors of Fondazione Prada in the form of a multi-sensory work examining how to be together.

A mechanical installation made up of 192 flip flops cheekily titled Sole crushing sees the shows march in eerie autonomy to a ballet-symphony-riot. It’s cathartic and chaotic, and intended to also evoke a state of delirium, something like the noise of a stadium, or the sounds of a Moroccan deqqa marrakchia.

Elsewhere, there’s a new film Bennani has made in collaboration with Orian Barki, set in a world of anthropomorphic animals, following the story of a Moroccan jackal filmmaker living in New York. The fiction within a fiction with its animated animal protagonists is both funny and touching, and contemplates how animation can be a potent vessel for meaningful messages in troubling times.