El Arbi Bouqdib Archive (EBA)

When El Arbi Bouqdib died in March 2016 in Bremen, he left boundless and yet to be measured secrets behind. In order to manage and structure his estate, the El Arbi Bouqdib Archive was founded in 2017. As part of Bublitz Thesaurós, its concern is to report on the life and work of Bouqdib.

The aim of the El Arbi Bouqdib Archives and all related artistic and curatorial activities is the poetic reconstruction of Bouqdib's life and the presentation, embedding and questioning of his research results, which have been produced over decades. This narrative and poetic form of reprocessing is the work of a growing number of different authors.

The multi-part exhibition cycle Elies Miniatures, begun in June 2018, and the concert exhibitions it contains, are the first poetic-hermeneutic approaches and first steps in the review and narrative of El Arbi Bouqdib.

About El Arbi Bouqdib

"I've always wished I had the gift, whenever it's raining,
of turning the rain into sunshine by means of explanations."

From one of E. Bouqdib's notebooks, 1987

When El Arbi Bouqdib passed away on 12th March 2016, he left behind countless secrets, as yet immeasurable in their significance.

Bouqdib devoted himself to a broad spectrum of different disciplines. He worked as a mathematician to solve Fermat's last theorem, wrote computer programmes, occupied himself with the physics of thinking, attempted to approach palmistry in a scientific way, worked on magical squares and even developed a theory of colours, amongst others. He was still working right up to his last hours, decrypting the great numerical code he considered to be in the Quran.

Bouqdib was born in Morocco in 1947. He came from a Sufi family and, from his early childhood onwards, was as fascinated by science as by its border phenomena. During an interview I conducted with him for "Bublitz" in August last year, he urged me to examine all his statements and set them in "the light of the sciences and falsification".

He moved to Europe at 19, living, studying and working in different towns and countries. During these young years, he could undoubtedly have been described as flamboyant. He wrote poems and stories, went motorbike racing, was a scientist and worked alongside Albert Hoffmann, the LSD researcher and chemist. However, during the last thirty years, which he spent in Germany, he became increasingly isolationistic and reclusive.

Bublitz has been granted access to a large, unordered collection of different materials. This consists of notebooks, photos, around a dozen books written by Bouqdib, but never published, hard drives and further documents.

The task now facing us is the archiving of these and, in dialogue with the family, the development of an appropriate form of presentation to convey the person, and in particular the work, of a scientist, researcher and mystic, but also, from the perspective of art, a meticulous Outsider artist. For this reason, the planned series of exhibitions on El Arbi Bouqdib will take place under the focus of Thesaurós.

JMH Schindele, Summer 2016