A panel exploring different audiovisual approaches which refer to coastal and maritime landscapes to touch upon phenomena and issues of ecology, modernization and colonisation set in the Moroccan context. These artistic film practices and researches at the intersection of history and memory, arts and science, come into a closer focus during the panel.
The panellists will refer to their video works, which will be shown online during the MENA Film Festival:
Sab’at ’Amwaj [video installation] | Yasmine Benabdallah | 2021
A silent video on loop of a ritual in the sea, accompanied with an audio piece in which I speak of memory, the Atlantic, history, science fiction, and gaps in the sand.
"Sab‘at ’Amwaj" is raw, imperfect, and anchored. It speaks to vulnerability and care, avoids the exoticization of our rituals, and straddles object of art and object of research. The ritual and the piece itself are intimately linked to lineage. A desire to keep, to record, not to forget. Finding beauty in knowledge, in memory, in transmission: a sense of belonging, of pertaining to a longer legacy. But also finding beauty in the things that get diluted with time, turn into tales, never to know which part was real and which wasn’t.
The installation looks at the ocean as a space of separation and a space of linkage, attempting to rekindle the rituals that have bound our bodies and the ocean for generations and which have been erased by modernization and colonization. I invite a return of our bodies to bodies of water, to think and feel an embodied and haptic experience as an alternative to the western and removed experience of the ocean. And yet, the image and the sound are separated, echoing a tension and a need for opacity.
Golden Frequencies [experimental oscilloscope film] | Younes El Hossaini & Elodie Sacher | 2021
The media continuously try to attribute to the earth’s exploitable resources numerous blandishing features such as the value of gold. Gold as the earth’s net worth and as an interchangeable color. Accordingly, the algae species Gelidium sesquipedale advanced to Morocco’s Red Gold. On the other side, researchers investigate the seaweed´s biochemical composition. 560Zoom’s experimental film can be located in-between the media’s narrative and the scientists’ research.
The lines circulating around each other, moving and shaking, visualize with the help of an oscilloscope the seaweed’s interior life. In fact, plants generate electrical signals in response to stimuli like temperature and light variations. 560Zoom highlights this scientific information, but rather extends it to a hardware-generated interpretation of the received signals. The collective makes use of science for artistic ends by “misusing” tech like an oscilloscope.
The electrical signals recorded originate from the following seaweed species: Gelidium sesquipedale, Gracilaria multipartita, Ulva lactuca (Field research El Jadida, Sept. 2021).
The film premiered at the P21 Gallery (29.10.-06.11.2021) in London and was later on showcased at the Festival Dardishi (Red Gold Reflections series, Nov. 2021), Onca Gallery Brighton (26.11.-23.12.2021) and The Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) Glasgow (January 2022).
A desktop decluttering from the shores of El Jadida [desktop documentary] | Elodie Sacher | 2021
The film invites the spectator to perceive the process of gathering and interlinking information in order to enhance an understanding of the emblematic narratives and facts around Morocco’s red algae.
The research threads are processed and interlinked through the decluttering of desktop files. The files themselves and their linkage to the Internet constitute the thrive of the narration. Moreover, the desktop film reflects on the hybrid work mode of the A.MAL residency, which is situated in between field research in the UK and Morocco, the digital space and personal reflection.
The film premiered at the P21 Gallery (29.10.-06.11.2021) in London and was later on showcased at the Festival Dardishi (Red Gold Reflections series, Nov. 2021), Onca Gallery Brighton (26.11.-23.12.2021) and The Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) Glasgow (January 2022).
A.MAL MEMBERS
Elodie Sacher is a media scholar with a special interest in visual and media cultures, focusing on photography and its historical as well as contemporary dimensions. She is holding a BA in Cultural Studies & Cultural Policy and is currently enrolled in a master program about Art & Film Studies. Elodie has been studying and working in Casablanca since 2018. In 2019, she worked for the cultural association L’Atelier de l’Observatoire (2019) accompanying projects about the material culture as well as implicit (intangible) cultural heritage of Casablanca. More recently, her French grandfather’s photo album picturing a trip in Morocco from the 1960s led her to the French protectorate’s archives and to the question of the intersection of gazes in photographs emanating from a colonial context/past. In her current research, she traces the history of photography in Morocco based on the royal portraits of Moroccan kings.
Jessica El Mal is an English-Moroccan artist and curator dedicated to valuing time, care and human connection in everything she works on. With a particular interest in ecology and migration, her work is both deeply personal and yet draws on the universality of the human experience through a balance of digital techniques, aesthetics and interaction. In addition to working on A.MAL Projects, she also hosts art and nature groups for people with experience of migration in Manchester, UK, benefiting from the healing aspects of both whilst also acting against the lack of representation with the UK’s natural spaces.
Younes El Hossaini is a tape camcorder videographer and media artist based in Casablanca. In 2019, he started to organise, with other cultural actors, music concerts at the Vertigo (Casablanca). On this occasion, he explored the possibilities of VJing with audiovisual hardware from the 1990s.
His interest in the unique aesthetics of sonic and visual hardware glitches, led to collaborations with Moroccan musicians such as Kussuf, Archidi, Raskas and Saad El Baraka. Subsequently, he formed the interdisciplinary collective 560Zoom with Badreddine Haoutar alias Snoopy (circus artist, DJ RetroCassetta) and Elodie Sacher (media scholar).
GUEST PANELLIST AND FILMMAKER
Yasmine Benabdallah is a Moroccan filmmaker and visual artist whose work explores memory, performance, embodiment, diaspora, archive, rituals, and time travel. Some of her recent works include “Ojalá: la vuelta al origen” (2018), a feature documentary on the dance of the Palestinian diaspora of Santiago, Chile, “Its people, its sky, its scent” (2018), a video installation on finding Chile in Palestine, “Our success is in sharing space or Allah made me queer” (2021), a short film and video installation on Islam, queerness, the private and public, and “Sab‘at ’Amwaj” (2021), a video installation on a ritual, the Atlantic, and lineage. Yasmine’s work has been shown in Morocco, France, Egypt, Germany, Portugal, the US, the UK, Palestine, in addition to artist residencies in Palestine, Morocco, France, Portugal, and Tunisia where Chebba won the Cinephilia Best Screenplay Award.
