“Do you remember when teleportation replaced air travel,” asks the fabulous crocodile who serves as an occasional guide to the CAPS, an island in the middle of the ocean of people who tried to enter the United States illegally.
Wait, what?
Welcome to the futuristic yet unsettlingly recognizable world depicted by Meriem Bennani in her film trilogy “Life on the CAPS,” the final installment of which is currently on view at the Renaissance Society. Over the past five years, the 33-year-old artist, who has lived in New York since 2009, has made a name for herself as a creator of wackily animated yet emotionally impactful videos, often starring animal avatars and mostly filmed on location in her home country of Morocco.
When shown in art spaces like the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris or MoMA PS1 in Queens, these videos have been fragmented into channels and projected onto multiple shaped, angled or layered surfaces, including the floor where visitors sit on stools bizarre enough to be film props. At Art Dubai, Bennani provided outdoor viewing pavilions disguised as giant bulbous lounge furniture in shades of bubble gum and lime; for the terrace of the Whitney Museum, she built them looking like a joke about tropical modernism.
On Instagram during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bennani collaborated with filmmaker Orian Barki to produce what The New York Times called “the canonical artwork about a very bad year” — actually two years, and definitely still counting — a series of eight very short, very moving and very funny videos about life under lockdown, featuring themselves as two lizards, with a rotating cast that included a no-nonsense mouse anchorwoman reporting on Black Lives Matter protests.
But back to teleportation replacing airplanes which, as one might imagine, massively impacts the possibilities for illegal immigration. The story Bennani spins in the CAPS trilogy begins with the American government intercepting migrants en route from Africa to the U.S., a dangerous disruption that leads to the total dissolution of many travelers. Those who survive a run-in with the quantum-jump border patrol often find their bodies altered from the ordeal: newly afflicted with giant ears, miniaturization, invisibility or “plastic-face syndrome” (a condition finally cured when a U.S. soldier catches it).
They end up housed on the CAPS, a tiny military outpost in the Atlantic Ocean that also serves as a global shipping and data way station. As refugee streams continue to flow, the island develops diasporic neighborhoods and new rituals: an internet pieced together from whatever horny scraps can be gleaned off the trooper network, a club subculture specializing in DJs that make beats from the sound of car horns and a fledgling rebellion of youths brandishing crocodile paintings on their chests. Unseen cavalry flying around on speeder bikes blaring red lights and loud music — sometimes sampled straight from CAPSi DJs — provide policing and enforce strict curfews. Oh, and old bodies can be replaced with young ones — if you have the money.
If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Science fiction often works this way, projecting into some technologically advanced time period in order to critically examine elements of present-day reality. It’s a clever trick that allows a creator to playfully dodge the ethical, historical and political minefields that might otherwise open up under her feet. By placing these stories on the imaginary CAPS in some unspecified near-future, Bennani is able to touch on the unending refugee crises of today, the traumas of dislocation, the nowhere of migrant camps and detention centers. She examines the in-between-ness of diasporic life, the thrills and casualness of its cross-cultural mixings. She considers state surveillance and its evasion, as well as global inequalities in medical research and other resources. She explores generational divides, community gathering and youth culture; she sees the obsession with age and its corollary, plastic surgery. Few of these topics can be safely broached in a climate as quick to cancel as is our current one, but that only makes doing so all the more necessary. Sci-fi is blessedly forgiving, of both maker and audience.
So too is humor, a tactic Bennani wields even more deftly and consistently in her work. Highlights from past projects include Rabat mansions with animated mouths singing about their architectural style and how it fits into post-colonial Morocco; cartoon surveillance cameras belting out the Alicia Keys hit “You Don’t Know My Name”; mock advertisements for a fictive line of hijabs outrageously decorated for major holidays; and a clubby number with dancing stethoscopes and toasters whose purpose, beyond pure hilarious weirdness, I can’t even explain.
“Life on the CAPS” is darker than the first two films in the series, not least because of a jangly and villainous score by Kuwaiti musician Fatima Al Qadiri. It’s also presented in a far less obviously fun environment — no quirky staging, just an enormous projection screen, disorientingly backlit and hovering on silver disks, ominously bracketed by metal rings. But it is nevertheless riotous, compared with most art made today. It’s also hip, in a way uniquely available to digital natives fluent in the lingoes and technologies, both lo- and hi-fi, of social media and memes. Paired together, coolness plus humor offer an irresistible approach to topics otherwise treated with the cold sobriety of news commentators or the solemn sincerity of so much social justice art-making. Bring on the cartoon pigs tripping while they run on treadmills. Oh, yes.
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“Meriem Bennani: Life on the CAPS” runs through April 17 at the Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue, 773-702-8670 or renaissancesociety.org. On April 10, at noon and 6 p.m., Renaissance TV will screen the entire “Life on the CAPS” trilogy. Exhibitions are free and reservations can be made in advance on tock.com