Meriem Bennani

Life on the CAPS is a monograph devoted to the artist Meriem Bennani’s film trilogy of the same name. In the bonkers world of the CAPS, air travel has been made obsolete by teleportation, enabling instantaneous passage across borders and oceans. On a fictive island in the middle of the Atlantic, a makeshift detention camp for intercepted migrants has developed into a bustling yet precarious megalopolis, with codes, rituals, and a burgeoning resistance movement of its own. Life on the CAPS offers a panoramic view of Bennani’s wildly inventive worldbuilding, with special consideration of her excursions into science fiction, biotechnology, and vernacular music, and beyond.

Layering live-action footage and computer-generated animation, Bennani intuitively adapts editing techniques that evoke documentary film, science fiction, phone footage, music videos, and reality TV. Her one-person exhibition at the Renaissance Society marked the debut of this personal, electric yet melancholic consideration of what it is to live in a state of limbo, and this accompanying book captures the film through a combination of still images and selections from a transcript of the film.