Marielle Chabal

Her latest completed project, Al Qamar (2019), is orchestrated around a futuristic fiction recounting the erection of an ultra-libertarian city by the Halmens, a community of female hackers. These hackers are behind a series of cyber-attacks on the international monetary system that resulted in the collapse of the capitalist system in 2024. A time of renewal and experimentation with societal models, which Marielle Chabal calls the "RESET", was thus rendered possible. The city of Al Qamar, which derives its name from the 54th sura of the Koran ("the hour is nigh and the moon has split"), then came into being in Palestine. Marielle Chabal's work is based on a transdisciplinary and collaborative practice: for Al Qamar, she invited some hundred artists, urbanists, architects and players from the art world to construct the fiction with her. In addition, the fiction has its roots in the creation of the fictitious review RESET! combining fictitious and real interviews around the subject of the construction of Al Qamar and the life of its residents. Al Qamar was born out of the recognition of the necessity of rethinking the bases of our social life. It is the setting for a utopia. Based on feminist values and a rejection of the old capitalist system, it promises the possibility of a rebirth. Erected on an old Israeli colony near Jericho, it nevertheless seems to run up against its own limits.