Ali’s work has always been connected with conservation: he is talking about a heritage,
about what we don’t want to lose, what must be preserved. Safe is certainly the most
emblematic work in this respect: some of the seeds locked up there are probably
disappearing from the “outside” world. This work is very symptomatic of Ali’s art, which
deals with the question of what is acquired and the anxiety of loss, the possibility of losing
this world itself. But that doesn’t make him an “ecological” artist. We could, rather, describe
him as an “eco-iconic” artist, that is to say, an artist who is as concerned about the image as
he is about the world. He is vitalist in his creation of images, distressed at the state of the
world, engaged in a continuous back and forth of perception and creation. As he always
does, Ali here both looks at the world in order to preserve its traces and stages these traces
so that his vision of the world is clearly understood as a poetic vision.

[Paul Ardenne, interview with the artist and Barbara Polla for the exhibition Subterranean at Jeu de
Paume, 2017.]