Re-imagi(nations)
Re-imagi(nations) is an ongoing arts and research project that questions narratives and forms of life experienced and invented by the migrant communities in Morocco for their speculative potential in order to imagine collective solutions to current pressing issues on social justice, radical ecology, indigenous and local knowledge.
The film was shoot during a creative workshop organized at the Darna theater (Tangier) in March 2023. The members of the workshop seize the creative prompt to share a story about an object that accompanied them during their journey. If for the artist it is above all a matter of a primar intuition:the necessity of clinging to something – however intangible it may be – in order to survive, the proposition is transformed into a sociological investigation of a material cultyre by definition in movement, recovering different meanings: the object-talisman which offers protection and incarnation, the body-object / the object-body which, in an ontological dimension allows us to situate ourselves and remember those who constitute us and are part of us like so many impossible mournings, the compass object which measures the space and time traveled and reminds us of the direction.
Related exhibitions
- Planetary design : reclaiming futures, Spore Initiativ, Berlin, 2024
- Re-imagi(nations), Kulte Art Center, Rabat, 2024
- Re-imagi(nations), Mahal Art Space, Tanger, 2023
Re-imagi(nations) II
sound pieceRe-imagi(nations) II mobilizes two allegories of the journey: the suitcase and the public transportation station. The suitcase is the receptacle and guardian of border stories, shared
in a sound creation in the form of a Dadaist cartography of crossing spaces, a polyphonic story composed of noises, songs, textures, rhythms of the body produced and collected collectively. Border towns are chanted to the rhythm of bus company touts who cries destinations to attract potential customers. Re-imagi(nations) II is a purely sonic poetry mapping of the psycho-geography of a migrant.
The red suitcase embodies not only travel but is also a tool serving a life on the move, allowing products to be sold and transported easily. It is the starting point of a fiction that Yemoh777s draws from its strong dramaturgical presence reinforced by the color red which embodies the concept of “courage”, a term used by migrant communities to speak of the fluid summoned before each attempt to crossing, not to deny danger and fear, but to transcend them.
Re-imagi(nations) therefore symbolizes a questioning of the above-ground process of building borders, of which the voice and the body remain the fundamental tools for re-appropriation of this process.
Click here to listen
Related exhibitions
- Re-imagi(nations), Kulte Art Center, Rabat, 2024
- Re-imagi(nations), Mahal Art Space, Tanger, 2023
Art of the Tranzit zone
The “transit zone” embodies a mental space, a black box, in which Yemoh777s deploys a transdisciplinary practice of text and image. This material constitutes a commentary on the documentation imposed in border areas, responding to the
administrative situation of migrant communities judged as “undocumented”, through a generous, practically compulsive, practice of the document.
The act of writing is illustrated in a daily practice where the notebook, the sheet of paper but also pieces of packaging boxes, tickets, photocopies of identity documents, leaflets, advertisements, offer limitless spaces for creation and expression for critical thinking exploring themes such as structural racism and social inequalities. The large number of documents produced over the years symbolizes a sense of urgency, between the importance of testimony, the catharsis and the need to reconstitute a scattered knowledge.
Related exhibitions
- Planetary design : reclaiming futures, Spore Initiativ, Berlin, 2024
- Re-imagi(nations), Kulte Art Center, Rabat, 2024
- Re-imagi(nations), Mahal Art Space, Tanger, 2024
Mer’chant singer
Close to an approach he describes as “social art,” the primary inspiration for Yemoh777s’s artistic work comes from the street and the creative forces that produce this vast territory. For “Mer’chant,” the artist collaborates with the Senegalese and Ivorian communities, whose economic, commercial, and cultural ties with Morocco have endured for centuries, despite current difficult living conditions. The sounds of sewing machines, songs, and the wind on the sand dunes form an ode to resilience and the re-imagining of a sensitive cartography of borders.
Maud Houssais
Yemoh observes, as if in counterpoint to the masterful sculpture that rises in the water, the random micro-sculptures left in the sand by human passages. Here a shoe, a pen, there a broken game or an electronic element. Imagining a story from each fragment of an object. He also tells us about the moments he spends in Laayoune embroidering and talking with Senegalese or Ivorian migrants in sewing workshops. What are the commercial and cultural links that persist? What culture is produced in situations of displacement? He tells us about these discussions, makes us listen to the sounds of sewing machines, shows us their creations.
Léa Morin
Related exhibitions
- Organic Knowledge, LE 18 derb el Ferrane, Marrakech, 2024, with M’barek Bouhchichi, Wiame Haddad, Emeka Okereke,
Yemoh777s.