Film: Weaving Itineraries

Weaving brings together – layers what has been singular into a net of thick and thin connections. It changes dispositions. To intertwine single strands is a gesture of creating a world. While unraveling too can be an act of coming together while coming apart.
Weaving Itineraries entwines the works of collaborators and friends for an evening of screenings and a live performance. Each artist, with their own compelling practices, presents works here that use slow and attentive camera movements to position, and reconcile, oppositions. Their camera takes on the role of documenting an existing or imagined reality. The works serve as a tool for political undertones embedded in poetic images and in generosity of creating with others. In ‘Barbès’, Randa Maroufi uses the direct gaze of a woman onto womxn, envisioning a public space as a matriarchal domain by subtly altering reality to reveal what it lacks. Hicham Gardaf’s ‘In Praise of Slowness’ follows a bleach seller in Tangier; through bleached-out tones and few words but the vendor’s chant, it portrays a slow-paced profession against the backdrop of a city marked by rapid industrialization. Souki Belghiti has adapted ‘Sandmen’, originally a multi-channel installation, for this night. It weaves a dream-like narrative between the sea and lullabies spoken in Darija, reflecting on profound questions of loss and perseverance. In ‘Hmou Ozaghar, A Changeling’s Tale’, AZ OOR responds live to the colonial and propagandistic story of Modernity with a moving image and sound performance. As an Amazigh Futurist, he layers poetic imagination onto existing documentation, concluding the night with a transformation. The event is curated by Maike Hemmers who met these makers after a residency at Think Tangier, and through the manyfold conversations of conjuring up a video project with the choir Stella in Tangier.
Maike Hemmers (1987, Germany) is an artist based in Rotterdam. She engages with play, emotions, and relationships in collaborative material processes. Her primary mediums are colorful, fuzzy, and abstract pastel drawings, textile sculptures, and public activations, with the different strands often coming together in the form of temporary installations. In Maike’s works, color is used as a bridge to connect asbtraction to the physical and mental body, and the body of the landscape we reside in. Maike received her MFA in 2017 at the Dutch Art Institute (NL). Her work has been shown at Kunstinstituut Melly (NL), Tent (NL), Milieu (CH), Firstdraft (AUS), among many others. In 2023, she was nominated for the Dolf Henkes Prize. Some of Hemmers’ writing can be found online at Nero Editions and The Site Magazine. Her practice has been funded by Stimuleringfonds, Prins Bernhard Fonds, Cbk Rotterdam, among others, and she is structurally supported by Mondriaan Fonds.
Barbès from the series Les Intruses

by Randa Maroufi

2019, France, 6 min., No language
Women «intruders» occupy – the time of a mise en scène – the public space. They adopt postures and occupy so-called masculine geographies, without minding the passage of time. They occupy the terraces, expose themselves in the strangeness of a public space of exclusion – that of gender.
Randa Maroufi, born in Casablanca (Morocco) in 1987, is an artist and filmmaker, whose artistic practice spans art and politics, the status of the image, and the limits of representation itself. She is a graduate of the Institut National des Beaux-Arts de Tétouan (Morocco), the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts d’Angers (France), and Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains (France).

She was a member of the Académie de France in Madrid, at the Casa de Velázquez. Maroufi has directed several films which wield an elastic relationship to the world. Many of her projects involve close collaboration with communities she has a connection to but is not a part of and employ a perspective she has described as ‘observation at a distance’.

This methodology has enabled her to construct scenes of strange reality that, while remaining committed to factual representation, forge an ethical relation to lived experience.
In Praise of Slowness

by Hicham Gardaf

2023, UK/Italy, 17 min., English and Moroccan w/ English subtitles
In the face of the global economic and technological forces reshaping the city of Tangier, the profession of the bleach vendors seems to be on the verge of disappearance, yet this filmic portrait of their supply chain—and notably their insistent chanting—conveys acoustic and visual images of endurance. In Praise of Slowness speaks to the accelerated urbanisation and industrialisation of Tangier, but also attests to how locally situated choreographies of Slowness articulate modes of resistance to the speed of capitalism.
Hicham Gardaf (b. 1989) is a Moroccan visual artist born in Tangier and lives and works in London. Gardaf works across photography and film, using them as vehicles to engage people in critical conversations with their immediate environment. A large part of Gardaf’s practice delves into transformations of contemporary landscape in relation to time, space, and politics of place. Recent screenings and exhibitions include the 74th Berlinale in Berlin, Open City Documentary Festival in London, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, Frac MÉCA in Bordeaux, Centre Pompidou in Paris, MACAAL in Marrakech, Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, and MAST Foundation in Bologna.
Sandmen

by Souki Belghiti

2023, Morocco, 8 min., Moroccan dialect with English subtitles
My video installation, “Sandmen” combines ancient Moroccan lullabies with memories of Casablanca’s beach told by its inhabitants in Moroccan Arabic (Darija). It questions the articulation of the intimate and the collective. How do we ground tales of perseverance in the face of the seemingly endless losses?

The lullabies and the ocean evoke the same nostalgic sense of lost wholeness from ancient times. The montage and the installation evoke memories echoing through time and space. The use of Moroccan Arabic and the lullabies allows me to bridge contemporary art with folk culture.
Souki Belghiti is a French-Moroccan visual artist. A graduate of Louis Lumière Film School in 2009, her experience as a filmmaker fosters her curiosity for different types of images and how they influence the narrative. She works with photography and video installations. Aware the camera can serve as a propaganda tool, she seizes it, on the contrary to make diverse voices converse. Living in Morocco, a country that has seen waves of colonization and ruptures throughout its history, she’s particularly concerned with transmission, wondering what should be passed-on to the next generations, and how.
Hmou Ozaghar, A Changeling’s tale

by AZ OOR

2022, 30mn, English, Amazigh, French
Before Modernity began providing magical solutions to ancestral lands, offering miracles and fulfilling dreams, one of the preferred tactics of Moderns was to abduct village children for Education, to change them, for the development mission. This changeling child becomes the new subject while the other child is taken to worlds with no return.

Hmou Ozaghar is a Counterpoint re-mise-en-scène and an archival dérive into La Fugue de Mahmoud (Mahmoud’s Escape, 1955), a propaganda movie promoting the colonial miracle of “development”. The story unfolds from the perspective of a French teacher recounting the journey of a gifted child from Timoulay, a rural Moroccan village. Mahmoud, living simply in a palm grove, dreams of becoming a mechanic and eventually escapes to Casablanca. The film was produced to illustrate the first stages of Marshall Plan policies, which also funded this production.
AZ OOR (b. 1992 Aghmat) is a visual artist, storyteller, and poet currently living in Rotterdam. An auto-proclaimed Amazigh Futurist, AZ OOR advocates for a poetic resurgence of indigenous consciousness and thinking processes within the Developmentocene.

By contemplating and listening to events, orality, archival material, plants, bestialities, ethnographical sludge, viral thoughts, cinematic crufts, and literary figures, AZ OOR’s visual vernacular oscillates between quasi-theater forms, fragmented texts, and scenographic vocality to articulate a living vocabulary for an Amazigh future that hasn’t yet happened and a nostalgia for something that didn’t exist.

AZ OOR’s work has been exhibited across Morocco and Europe, including Drawing Room UK, MMVI d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Crac Occitanie, Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Market Gallery Glasgow, and has participated in several international artist-in-residency programs, including Matadero Madrid, Guest Projects, London, and Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.
Cineville valid at the door and bookable online on the day of the event!