Five months ago, a pretty important envelope dropped into the mailbox of Meriem Bennani’s lawyer. The Moroccan-born, New York-based artist had been granted a green card, and was now a lawful, permanent resident of the US. “It’s weird,” she says over a glass of sparkling water in a bar close to Nottingham Contemporary, the gallery where she is installing Life on the Caps, her new video exhibition. “Of course, I’m grateful. My whole life has been lived from visa to visa.” She expresses ambivalence towards her new home, before adding that she doesn’t want to focus too much on herself, “because, you know, I’m OK”.
This puts Bennani in dramatic contrast to the characters in Party on the Caps and Life on the Caps, her two half-hour videos set in a futuristic sci-fi detention camp called Caps (short for “capsule”), situated on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. In the films, teleportation has replaced air travel. Would-be illegal immigrants to the US are intercepted as they attempt to zap across the Atlantic, and interned in the camp, which has developed from an insular holding pen to a sprawling migrant settlement and Latin quarter.
