Bouchra Khalili in Conversation with Joachim Ben Yakoub
With an introduction by Joachim Ben Yakoub
The full conversation is available in the book Bouchra Khalili (2022) Stories Within Stories. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. you can order here
Bouchra Khalili works across film, video, installation, photography, printmaking and editorial platforms. Originating from long and extended research, her interdisciplinary practice examines imperial and colonial continuums as epitomized by contemporary forced illegal migrations and the suppressed memory of anti-colonial struggles and international solidarity.
Deeply informed by the legacy of post-independence avant-gardes and vernacular traditions from her native Morocco, Khalili’s methodology develops strategies of storytelling at the intersection of history and micro-narratives. She suggests a meditation on the power of civil poetry as defined by Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and as practiced for centuries in Al-Halqa, Morocco’s oldest tradition of public storytelling.
The works in Stories Within Stories bring together singular positions articulating collective voices for rethinking emancipatory forms of citizenship, resistance and solidarity. The various contributions in this book investigate Khalili’s original techniques of storytelling inviting us to experiment with new forms of civic imagination.
A Proposal for a Method
In the same way as the majority of Bouchra Khalili’s artworks, An Audio Family Album (2020) begins with a series of personal encounters, this time with members of a new generation of Maghrebi artists and activists in Brussels. Offering a sonic iteration of her visual praxis, she forms a living online family album of voices, reestablishing stories of resistance, acoustically repairing memories of rebellion. In her search for voices produced by the persistence of history echoing in the present, she decided to close her eyes and listen to the voiced murmurs circulating and resonating in the diasporic al-halqa of Brussels. To convey these family stories to her audience, Khalili’s proposition for The Diasporic Schools, an exhibition by Kunstenfestivaldesarts held in 2020, returns to the collaborative methods central to her oeuvre, reconsidering the figuration of the civic poet as “hlayqi·a.”[i]
The title of her 2017 video installation The Tempest Society refers to the legacy of Al Assifa, a self-organized autonomous theater company created in 1973 by Maghrebi workers, partisans of the Movement of Arab Workers, in Paris. Both the journal of the movement and the theater company were named after the armed revolutionary wing of Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian National Liberation Movement, highlighting the workers’ allegiance to their origins in the French Palestine Committees since 1967. The group engaged in new forms of improvised action theater and agitprop, playing during factory strikes and in community spaces and occupied public squares. Simultaneously, they were active in a variety of demonstrations against rampant racism and police violence, and in defense of dignified working conditions, continuously acting in a spirit of internationalist solidarity. In the constructed narrative of The Tempest Society, stories of anticolonial struggle and internationalism intertwine with tales of civic becoming.
For An Audio Family Album, Khalili reestablished a precise link with the various ways in which Al Assifa created the conditions for stories and information to circulate in the diaspora. In response to low literacy levels among Arab workers in Paris at the time, members of Al Assifa chose to read aloud the most important news items from the daily newspaper in cafés where workers congregated. The group also set up Radio Assifa and distributed cassette recordings of their chronicles to keep the community up to date, vocalizing the state of affairs of different social and political conflicts and mobilizations. Most importantly, Al Assifa applied the endangered art form of al-halqa, once a widespread and subversive performing art in the Maghreb, in order to reflect on the ambiguity of the power relations shaping current events around them; in particular, the racist murder of the young Djellali Ben Ali or the murder of Mohamed Diab at the hands of the police. In al-halqa—to paraphrase Philippe Tancelin, one of Al Assifa’s founding members—the storyteller does not have the authority of the author; as the conveyor of a collective and historical discourse, he or she is subjected to real and equal questioning by the public and can thus be challenged by the audience at any moment during any public performance.
The reemergence of al-halqa as a circular performative form in the diasporic context of the Arab workers’ movements in Paris in the 1970s is intricately linked to the various ways in which the anticolonial struggle seeped through the Maghrebi theater landscape. Discussions arose here about different strategies for decolonizing the dramatic repertoire and its canon. The return of both the device of the storyteller (hlayqi/hlayqia) and the circular arrangement of the performance made space for hybrid theatrical forms. These forms were characterized by the hybridization of languages reflecting the maghrebi linguistic diversity and traversed by fantastic, mythical and historical tales, with characters and figures anchored in the translocal histories of the Maghreb, and theatrical modalities borrowed from Amazigh and Islamic traditions, as well as Brechtian aesthetics and documentary theater.
This hybridization strongly influenced the work of a new movement of theater makers, represented by figures such as Kateb Yacine, Abdelkader Alloula, and Tayeb Saddiki, each of whom, in their own way, combined different performative approaches with popular forms, wielding experimental and politically engaged poetics with a certain sense of ceremoniality.[ii] Theater regained its function as a distant, interactive but always critical mirror, questioning and subverting what can be said or heard and what should remain silenced, reconsidering what is visible and what is indiscernible, and reinstating the oral narrative as a powerful form of resistance to hegemonic discourse and ways of knowing and sensing the world.
In An Audio Family Album, Bouchra Khalili relates to the endangered circular form of al-halqa central to Al Assifa’s practice in order to rearticulate the uncanny intricacies of diasporic family stories.[iii] In doing so, she taps into the contemporary need to tell forgotten stories of resistance and liberation, but also to generate new oral forms, and through these forms to reinvent new tales and myths. Together they have the potential to constitute what Stuart Hall called a living archive or, in this case, a living family album. Through their performed orality, the family stories told in al-halqa remain in a permanent state of suspension. Like diaspora itself, the animated form of al-halqa is inherently unstable, nomadic, and always moving in different directions, so the family stories told and the relations formed never fully crystallize, surpassing the scriptocentric limits of the written world. By doing so, Khalili holds space for the possible resurgence or reemergence of silenced and erased memories, to re-world the divided world we inhabit today, adding another stone to the edifice of a decolonial history of the voice, to quote Ana María Ochoa Gautier.[iv]
In The Tempest Society, Khalili invited three Athenian students to summon the presence of the Al Assifa group through the performance of first-person accounts of diasporic experiences of struggles against racism and xenophobia in Athens, alternated with readings of Al Assifa’s manifesto Les Tiers-Idées (Third Party Ideas , 1997) and selected excerpts of the 2017 novel My Name Is Europe by Gazmend Kapllani. In her proposal for The Diasporic Schools, however, Khalili invites a new generation of Maghrebi artists and activists to read exhumed family stories of liberation that have influenced their past and retain the potential to inspire current forms of diasporic resistance, all the while becoming part of a newly constituted family album. Inspired by the legacy of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Khalili calls on these artists and activists to embody the figuration of the civil poet as “hlayqi·a,” oscillating through free indirect speech in an intertextual play between historical citations and personal narratives, speaking through concerned and involved individuals to reassemble and render audible a conversant collective voice—not giving voice to but speaking near those who are absent or silenced, so as to bear witness to the various ways in which historical injustices can be continuously resisted. Going beyond the representational restriction of time and space in the fabulation of a family album, a people to come is invented that prefigures a world to come, where the diasporic would a priori be inscribed in every school, remembering the ancestral lineage of resistance that made a free and dignified life possible.
[i] For The Diasporic Schools, the Brussels international arts festival Kunstenfestivaldesarts commissioned and presented six new artistic projects in 2020, by Tania Bruguera, Otobong Nkanga, Christian Nyampeta, Yael Bartana, Samah Hijawi & Reem Shilleh, and Bouchra Khalili. The projects were based on new forms of knowledge circulation in diasporic contexts. The resulting work of Bouchra Khalili is presented on the dedicated website http://www.audiofamilyalbum.com.
[ii] Kateb Yacine, Abdelkader Alloula, and Tayeb Saddiki are three major figures of the postcolonial Maghrebi theater, conceptualized by Abdelkrim Berrechid as “ceremonial theater”; see Abdelkrim Berrechid, “Le théâtre cérémoniel (al lhtifaliyya),” Horizons Maghrébins 58 (2008), pp. 75–81. See also Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson, The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the Maghreb (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
[iii] To read more on the influence that the concept of al-halqa had on the visual praxis of Bouchra Khalili, see for instance “Twenty-Two Hours: Bouchra Khalili in Conversation with Hendrik Folkerts,” Mousse Magazine 64 (2017).
[iv] Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
[v] Bouchra Khalili, The Tempest Society, artist’s publication (London: Book Works, 2019).
[vi]Ahmad Bouanani, “Introduction à la poésie populaire marocaine,” Souffles 3 (1966), pp. 3–9.
[vii] Abdelmalek Sayad, ”La malédiction » in Pierre Bourdieu « La misère du monde » Seuil, Paris, 1993
REVOLTING SENSES 