SALAM LONDON Video art programme

With: Zainab Andalibe & Nicolas Kozerawski, Touda Bouanani, Ro Caminal, Simohamed Fettaka, Laila Hida, Hamedine Kane, Rim Mejdi, Abdelmohcine Nakari, Anna Raimondo,

Oussama Tabti, Jacob Wiener Curated by Francesca Masoero & Laila Hida / LE 18

16th October 2018 // 6.30 - 22.00 PM Salam London is the proposal of LE 18 for GHOST, a programme curated by MINT WORKS

and hosted by Guest Projects (1 Andrews Rd London E8 4QL)

As a house offering living and working space to artists, cultural practitioners and researchers, and as one of the still rare cultural pluridisciplinary spaces in Marrakech therefore often integrating external proposals to its own programming, hospitality is a fundamental component of LE 18’s DNA. Mirroring this, as well as the dynamic interplay between the roles of guest and host played with MINT Collective across the years, for the opening night of GHOST in London, LE 18 proposes a curated video art programme (and here the term does explicitly refer to its latin foundation - that of ‘curare’), showcasing video pieces, short films and documentaries developed by artists LE 18 has been hosting, engaging and exchanging with since its creation in 2013. Conceived as an immersive experience to be navigated throughout the space and time of the evening and across cultural and social geographies, SALAM LONDON operates as an orchestra of voices, a multi-vocal constellation exploring, performing and redesigning competing identities, subjectivities, territories and mobilities, from localised and counter-hegemonic positions. Kicking off the evening, SALAM LONDON proposes at first a quite feminine and indeed feminist screening session, featuring the works of four artists, Anna Raimondo, Touda Bouanani, Ro Caminal and Rim Mejdi, all powerfully addressing through different lenses, the politics and poetics of gender, femininity and the social role women perform in and across different social, cultural and political economic landscapes. Following the screening, the audience is invited to navigate across the space, engaging with the video installations punctuating it. The works by Simohamed Fettaka, Oussama Tabti, Laila Hida and Abdelmohcine Nakari, all playfully question and attempt to invert the structures and processes constructing and reproducing (Arab and/or Moroccan) identities, exploring the role that language, music, the production of images and the performativity of bodies play therein. The installations by Zainab Andalibe & Nicolas Kozerawski, Jacob Wiener and Hamedine Kane, finally, explore or perform, often through a sociological eye interlaced with a poetic language, territories and dynamics of migration, mobilities and labour.

Established in 2013, LE 18 is a multidisciplinary cultural space in Marrakech, which promotes artistic and cultural exchanges by offering a space for research, creation and expression. LE 18 aims at supporting the local emerging art scene, bridging it with international ones, while fostering a reflection on the role of contemporary art in the region through research and residency programmes, exhibitions and public gatherings. Located in the medina, LE 18 offers a close proximity to the city's traditional life, bringing its inspiring qualities into closer contact with the practices and reflections of invited artists, while critically investigating and attentively investing the sociocultural transformations it is undergoing. www.le18marrakech.com

http://www.le18.weebly.com/http://www.le18marrakech.com/

EVENING PROGRAMME

18H30 / Opening - Video installations 19H / Introduction by Mint work

19H30 - 20H30 / Screening session 20H30 - 22H / Video installations

VIDEO INSTALLATIONS HAMEDINE KANE Inhabiting the World, 2016 Video dyptik HD 16/9, 14’33’’ Inhabiting the world – On a sidewalk means leaving traces on the bodies and memories of our similar. Inhabiting is opening up a new imaginary scape on the places where we live, the ones we desire, those in which we suffer, those that you ignore. The work sheds light on the territories crossed and occupied by the refugee: harbours, enclaves, deltas, and borders transformed in desolated places and in spaces of detention. It investigates how the footprint of memory is engraved in these confining and imprisoning territories and how these latter turn from hostile spaces to places of life and creativity. The work of Hamedine Kane (1983, Nouakchott) focuses on exile and wandering, but also the heritage of socialist regimes in the years of independence. ZAINAB ANDALIBE & NICOLAS KOZERAWSKI Fil d’Ariane, 2016 Video dyptik, 9’ In contact with the scope and rigor of the desert, everything reduces to the minimum, the little, management, the economy. Economy of means and forms, economy of gestures, of movements and displacements, produced by a place both empty and full, where the rules of the city are transformed into survival rules. Working with the context means trying to understand its functioning, making it the foundation of artistic intervention. In the desert, we are explorers and artists. Zainab Andalibe and Nicolas Kozerawski are an artist duo associated to the ESACM. They develop a work on context as revealer of an ontological landscape, that of a connection between Us and the Other in a Place. It is often in these distances and convergences that a landscape comes to life.

JACOB WIENER Hauts-de-France, 2016 16mm film, 11’ Co-produced by Le Fresnoy - Studio National des arts contemporains 16mm film developed using red wine and a chemical process elaborated and implemented by the artist. This film leads the viewer into a world that is both lived and imagined, one of drunkenness and insecurity, which allows the tension of current events to stain a personal reading of the landscapes of Northern France through the gentle erosion of the images on screen. Jake Wiener (1986, Los Angeles) has worked as a film projectionist, archivist and production assistant, splitting his time between Paris, New York and Tangier. He is interested in the tangible qualities of film as a medium of personal and romantic communication, as well as its enduring yet compromised use as a stable archival material in the age of digital memory. OUSSAMA TABTI Barbarian, 2017 Video documentation of performance, 1’10’’ The French denomination of the barrel organ, « orgue de Barbarie », may refer to the exotic origin of its street players during the XVII and XVIII century, who were thought to blabber in ‚broken‘ French. For a long time, North Africa had been identified as Barbaria, a term used by the Romans to refer to foreign lands and ‚uncivilized‘ people. Today this region is a crossroad for thousands of people attempting to reach Europe, often experiencing rather tough journeys. Playing with historical suggestions and contemporary dynamics, Barbarian is a performative wandering through the public space of Mannheim (DE) in which a barrel organ plays Beethoven‘s Symphony No. 9, an Ode to Joy and the official anthem of the European Union. Oussama Tabti (1988, Algiers) attempts in his work through different media to take position on the different transformations and phenomena characterising contemporary society.

ABDELMOHCINE NAKARI Patchwork of Identities / الهویات المرقعة / Identités bigarrées / Identidades abigarradas, 2009 Video, 1’50’’

Languages do not know borders, they happily emigrate from a culture to the other and mutually nourish each other, no matter their original linguistic branch or the ethnic and religious identities of those who speak them. In Tangier both French and Spanish, thanks to the “enlightened” colonial enterprise have heavily influenced modern, Moroccan Arabic. Abdelmohcine Nakari (1974, Tangier), a “child of the medina” of Tangier, is a meticulous witness of the great transformations his city is undergoing. Photographer and filmmaker, he attempts to formalise the anxiousness and concerns placing man at the core of a complex problem: how to exist and grow in a disembodied environment? SIMOHAMED FETTAKA The greatest show on earth, 2012

Collage animation, 4/3, coulor, stereo, 5’12’, no dialogue Coproduced by CulturesInterface

The greatest show on earth, is a video collage presenting a fragmented history of the images of television and its iconography. Key instrument shaping the minds and the behaviours of contemporary society, the work represents the television as a porte-parole reproducing the dominant order, and as a key actor of modern history. The work of Simohammed Fettaka (1981, Tangier) reflects on the presentation of the image. This graphic personal interpretation is based on collective memory: the individual visual experience must thereby lead us to question our sense of ourselves.

LAILA HIDA Arnakech, 2018 Video documentation of performance

Adopting the aesthetic features of a traditional halqah, Arnakech is a pop up photographic studio that installed itself in the earth of Jemaa el Fna (Marrakech). Developed in the context of Charita, a programme curated by Madrassa Collective, Arnakech offered tourists the possibility to portrait themselves in the most symbolic and exoticised square of the city. Developed with the complicity of the association Ana Kanbghi Jemaa el Fna, and the participation of Walid Rkaiki, Kamal Dardiba and Ismail Ougoud as protagonists of the intervention, Arnakech subverted the conventional roles between the photographer and her assistants, while redefining both the subjects producing the image and the objects of it. As such, the project embodied a detournement of the power relations and positions of photographic and portraying practices, while also playfully questioning the presence of strange(r) bodies and the dominant Western canons recognized, and demanded for the so-called modern and contemporary African studio photography.

Based in Marrakech, Hida is a photographer exploring the tensions between the narrative potential of the camera and the selective nature of memory. Hida is the founder of LE 18 (Marrakech).

SCREENING SESSION RIM MEJDI Out of Town, 2014 Fiction documentary, 18’ Produced by ESAV, Marrakech Assia is dropped off at the edge of town without telling her friend Amine why. But Saïd, the garage mechanic there, who she does not know, is aware of the reason. As she waits to meet Saïd’s mother, Assia spends the day with him in this unfamiliar place. Rim Mejdi (Marrakech, 1989) is a film director, where she usually uses diverted narratives and subtle mise en scène to depict characters in the search of their identity.

TOUDA BOUANANI Fictions, 1997 Video, 11’ Realised with the support of the Conseil Régional d’Aquitaine, France.

Composed by three fictions, each tells the story of women. In Fiction 1 Yasmine, a housewife never go out, tells us her story, letting us in her imaginary world. The text is inspired by "The shutters” (published in english by New Directions, New York, 2018 translated from french by Emma Ramadan), a collection of poems of Ahmed Bouanani, father of the artist, filmmaker and writer. In Fiction 2 a clairvoyant tells her story and power through a Hispano-Moroccan card game, the Ronda. Fiction 3 presents “Reflections in a courtyard”, extrait of an oriental travel of Isabelle Eberhardt, with “songs from the exile” collected and sang by Taos Amrouche. Isabelle Eberhardt traveled in the Maghreb in the late nineteenth century often disguised as a man. The work of Touda Bouanani (1966 Rabat), searches a dialogue between poetic text and image. Her practice is nourished by readings, intimate and family references and objects coming from her daily life as well as her childhood.

RO CAMINAL Unfolding Penelope, 2017 Video, 20’ Departing from the title, the video establishes a divergent parallelism in between the wife of the Senegalese migrants’ and the Odysseus’ Penelope. The protagonist do not just take Penelope’s roll, but subvert it. Parallelism due the similarity in the long periods waiting for their husbands’ return home. Divergence because, here these women take the enunciation power, to tell us how they deal with their reality and they how negotiate with the social pressure surrounding them, that like in the Odysseus, also would love relegating them into a second term. With an educational background in the Fine Arts and the Anthropology’s fields, Ro Caminal develops her artistic practice exploring the world of re-presentation, hybridizing undisciplined between both fields.

ANNA RAIMONDO A Mermaid is on Air, 2016 HD VIDEO, 10’48’’ Commissioned by María Andueza for Radio Reina Sofia (Es). Co-produced by Ö1 Kunstradio (At), Radio Revolten (De). Foley artist: Celine Bernard. Half bird or half fish; femme fatale or simple and innocent beautiful girl; prophet or destroyer, the mermaid is a mystery crossing different universes and registers. Becoming woman, waves, becoming mermaid, A Mermaid Is On Air is a sonic trip through these universes, where voice, subjectivity and the process of the perception of listening become central explorative means. The work deconstructs the myth of the mermaid, mixing different legends and stereotypes about this figure. It is an ironic and poetic way to approach what “being woman” could mean, while activating the imaginary related to the sea as a horizon of possibility where to find the other and a self in constant transformation. Anna Raimondo (1981, Naples) explores differences and multiple identities in order to break barriers between them. Vehiculated by performance, video, sound art or radiophonic creation, and through playful and humorous tones, Raimondo’s work is a journey that evokes and celebrates social diversity while creating possible areas of interaction.