Mohamed Bourouissa, twelve portraits with no image

Twelve tracks. Eight of them are two or three letters long: HFC, MG, FZB, NMB, AF, MN, JQ, AB. One carries a whole name, LILA, and it is the one that gives the record its title.

The other three are INTRO, OUTRO and SEUM. The first two hold the list inside a pair of brackets. The last is the only word that belongs to nobody.

Each track is dedicated to a person Mohamed Bourouissa had in mind while writing it. He calls the record a “musical object”, an inventory of the relationships that matter in his life.

It is the first record by a visual artist whose job is exactly this: portraits of people. Except that here the people cannot be seen, and are never even named.

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The outskirts, posed

Bourouissa was born in Blida, Algeria, in 1978. He studied visual arts at the Sorbonne until 2004, then photography at the Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and went through Le Fresnoy between 2008 and 2010.

Between 2005 and 2008 he built the series that made his name, Périphérique. They are scenes from the Paris outskirts that look stolen and are in fact assembled piece by piece.

He draws preparatory sketches before going out, directs friends and acquaintances on site, adjusts the composition during the shoot, and works in large format with the measured light of an advertising campaign.

The model is not reportage: it is history painting. Caravaggio, Delacroix, Géricault. The tension sits in the position of the hands and the direction of the gazes, exactly as it does in a canvas.

“All these things that are really part of European culture, I wanted to reinterpret with this new French youth, with its own history, its own codes”, he told Aperture.

The subject of Périphérique is not the banlieue. It is the way the banlieue gets looked at.

The device works because it dismantles from the inside. The same people the evening news films in a hurry and always the same way enter the grammar of museums, and from there the stereotype becomes visible.

In 2018 the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris gave him Urban Riders, his first solo show in a French museum, built around the film Horse Day, shot among the riders of Strawberry Mansion in Philadelphia.

In 2020 he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize with Free Trade, the installation shown the previous year at the Rencontres d’Arles.

Sound stayed at the edge of the work

In 2008 he started Temps mort, an eighteen minute video made with Al, a friend serving a sentence. A year of phone to phone exchanges, more than three hundred texts and picture messages.

Bourouissa sent phone credit and instructions on what to film, and got back very low resolution images shot inside the prison. Then he printed them, rephotographed them and blew them up. The title comes from Booba’s debut album.

From there the line never breaks, and it always runs alongside the work on images.

“I see sound as a vector of history and memory, sometimes traumatic”, he says. “Working with frequencies, noises and breaths opens up a space for reparation, a cathartic possibility.”

Twelve tracks, twelve people

LILA came out on 24 July 2026 on PAN, the label that has spent years collecting the margin between experimental electronics and sound art. James Ginzburg mixed it, Rashad Becker mastered it.

The material is weightless synths, Auto-Tuned voices and beat sequences that come apart. PAN presents it as a diary of hypnagogic reflections, the half sleep in which images arrive on their own.

There are four guests, not three as it is often reported: Le Diouck on MG, Lion on NMB, Assounta on AF, Mushy on the title track.

Le Diouck, born Magueye Diouck, is Franco-Senegalese, sings in Wolof, French and English, and released his debut Grace Joke on PAN in 2025. Mushy is the Italian artist Valentina Fanigliulo, who also records as Phantom Love.

Nothing public turns up about Lion and Assounta. On a record that is a list of people close to him rather than a shop window of collaborations, that is the most consistent detail of all.

There is also a correspondence the record does not explain. The ninth track is called JQ, and Jordan Quiqueret, the programmer of the acacia frequencies, has exactly those initials.

SEUM, the only word that is not a name

Seum comes from the Arabic dialect word sèmm, meaning venom, and by extension jealousy and rage. It surfaces in French around 2004, spreads from 2012 through rap, then through the speech of the estates and from there into everyone’s.

Avoir le seum is not the same as being angry. It is the bitterness left behind after losing something, which is why in France it gets said to the face of whoever has just lost a match.

On the record SEUM is track seven, three minutes and one second. It closes nothing: it sits in the middle of the list, between AF and MN, as if a feeling had been filed away among the people.

The record is closed by OUTRO, which answers INTRO and puts the list back inside its brackets.

What is left when the portrait cannot be looked at

Bourouissa says he works on language as material first and meaning second: vowels, consonants, breaths and inflections count for the way they sound.

That is why none of these voices lets itself be recognised. Auto-Tune here corrects nothing, it moves things further away.

In Périphérique the people were extremely visible, lit and posed, and the whole work consisted of putting pressure on whoever was looking at them. In LILA they are two letters and a voice processed until it is nobody.

What is left is a list that a listener cannot decode and the people who inspired it recognise on the first note. A private notebook published in full, which is also the simplest way to make a portrait without handing anyone over.