Informed by my experience as a first-generation Moroccan woman growing up in Canada, my interdisciplinary art practice examines issues around cultural hybridity, diasporic identity and belonging. Anchored in the compositional logic of collage and assemblage, my work with textiles, video, performance, sculpture, drawing, and installation stems from the need to make home in the image. At the center of my practice, auto-representation is a portal for thinking about displacement, creolization and re-rooting at a societal scale. Fragmentation, contortion and distortion of the body in space act as the container for a family history marked by multiple dislocations and rapid cultural mutations. I am interested in the unstable nature of the grounds on which we build our identities and in the tensions emerging from the contradictory pulls within diasporic cultures.
My process is animated by the following questions: How can I make home in cultural in-betweenness? How can I articulate the complexity of a multi-local/multilingual/aporetic Self? And how can I find new ways of signifying Maghrebi diasporic consciousness that both celebrates cultural hybridity and resists assimilation? Obsessed by the parts of my history that have been lost in translations and transitions between places and languages, I search visual evidence of my diverse cultural affiliations in order to constitute my own narratives about belonging. I collect images, symbols, footages, texts and materials that I cut in pieces, put in motion, digest, reorganize and reassemble into new hybrid forms. The camera plays a central role in this process, acting as scissors and glue to deconstruct and reconfigure the world around me. Through the surreal overlaps of life with fabulation, the personal with the historical, the here with the elsewhere and the ancient with the digital, I investigate the contrapuntal culture in which the Maghrebi diaspora dwells across continents and explore my capacity to inhabit multiple worlds at once.
