Curated by Silvia Franceschini, Le Déracinement (Uprooting) is an exhibition whose inspiration and title come from the studies conducted by sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad during the Algerian War (1954-1962). Their work scrutinized how the forced displacement and resettlement of Algerian peasants by the French military resulted in large-scale migration and the erasure of familiar patterns of life.
Turning to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the exhibition features artworks that reimagine, disentangle and rewrite colonial and postcolonial histories of displacement.
Artists evoke fictions and imaginations, shifting our gaze from the comfort of solid ground to one of restless seas and hybrid identities created over centuries, through trajectories that crisscross the Mediterranean and Atlantic. They question the language of integration, assimilation and inclusion that is assumed within national frameworks and disrupt exclusionary concepts of belonging.
In the exhibition, Sara Ouhaddou presents her work Kharboucha - Extract: Liyam wa liyam (Days and days), a series of paintings that she has realized during her residency at the Cité internationale des arts.
Sara Ouhaddou’s work addresses the erasure of Maroccan local culture and how this is reshaped by diasporic experience. In this installation she departs from the story of her family: members of the Amazigh community who immigrated to France. Her parents never learned to read or write the Arabic language, but they did approach it in a visual way. That 'seeing' of language became the starting point for this large-scale screen print, made up of an alphabet of symbols derived from Arabic and Amazigh weaved into Islamic geometric patterns. The alphabet depicts a song by Hadda Al Ghitia (Kharboucha), a popular and mythical figure from the oral tradition of rural Morocco. Her love songs denounced the political injustices of the French colonial occupation and mobilized a population that could neither read nor write towards women emancipation and anticolonial resistance. By using paper, the medium of the written word par excellence, Sara Ouhaddou addresses the (im)possibility of documenting oral traditions. In imagining a universal alphabet, the artist presents a way of inhabiting hybrid positions that allow us to change without erasing who we have been.
Sara Ouhaddou (France) is recipient of the "Art Explora & Cité internationale des arts" program.