Yasmine Benabdallah

series of conversations and writing workshops (ongoing)

The project co-developed with Rim Mejdi (Moroccan filmmaker and artist) aims to create a collective manifesto to decolonize the Moroccan archives. It is a project that is grounded in intimate accounts of the conditions of history/ies’ erasure and dispossession perpetuated by the ongoing fabrication of a missing and inaccessible archive in the Moroccan context.

Emerged from direct experiences and through conversations that took place among others during the Ch[a]rita program 2021, co-curated by Rim Mejdi, Francesca Masoero, and Nouha Ben Yebdri and hosted by LE 18, Dar Bellarj Foundation, and Mahal Art Space, the project calls for the collective writing of a manifesto to address the politics of access to archives in and from Morocco. The beginning of our project was recently published in a podcast on Screen Worlds, a decolonizing film and screen studies platform hosted by SOAS, University of London.

In June 2022, we were invited to organize two talks at documenta, where we presented the manifesto project and exchanged with Subversive Film, a Palestinian collective who have been working on similar projects of archiving, as well as preservation under colonization. We shared our approaches to processes of decolonizing archives in our respective contexts, expanding on ideas at the root of this decolonial project and methodologies related to internal and/or external politics, methods of address to institutions, and intersectional experiences and how they influence our diverse forms of political existence and resistance.

In July 2023, as part of the Building Archives program co-organized by Dar Bellarj and Le 18, Rim and I co-organized "Freeing Moroccan Archives from Colonialism", a three-day workshop in Marrakech which gathered artists, researchers, and cultural actors to read, discuss, and write a manifesto together.