THE ONE WITH THE MANES
exhibition project
"The one with the manes" is a multimedia exhibition exploring a shared history between Morocco, Brazil, and Portugal through video installations, photographs, and watercolors. Inspired by a forced exodus across the Atlantic, the exhibition explores rituality, memory, archives, and embodiment. The installations offer subtle gestures that defamiliarize the art space and bear witness to the invisible erasures operated by power. “Manes,” signifying both ancestral souls and lions' manes, permeate the exhibition's liquid, opaque structure. By focusing on sensory experiences, the installations aim to erode, infiltrate, and reimagine archives. They foreground bodies’ resonances through the past and present, envisioning liberatory futures.
In the eighteenth century, the Portuguese who had colonized a city on the coast of Morocco which they named Mazagão (name of indigenous origin meaning the one with the manes), forced an exodus of two thousand people, Portuguese and slaves of unknown origins to Brazil, to a settlement they named Nova Mazagão. The project explores this thread between Morocco and Brazil, countries with different histories but with common paradoxes in the past, present, and future, using science fiction as a prism. Memory and oral history open collective conversations about our relationship to time and to bending it.
One of the first iterations of the project is "Sab‘at ’Amwaj.” More information on the installation can be found here.