A story between yesterday’s and today’s Morocco. Le Bal in Paris
La Bête, a modern tale by Yasmina Benabderrahmane who has been travelling across the sand dunes and plains of her native country, which after fourteen years of absence she attemps to reclaim through a visual language. Yasmina Benabderrahmane invites us to follow the winding paths between these two worlds: current and past. Her work is inhabited by her family history, between metaphor and raw fragments. First of all, there is the Uncle, a geologist responsible for the “Beast” in the Bouregreg Valley, guarantor of the earth and memory. A little further on, there is the Grandmother in Chichaoua, who manages time and weaves customs, from henna to the viscera.
In these familiar spaces and bodies where the unsettled history of contemporary Morocco plays out, Yasmina Benabderrahmane focuses on details and textures, and on hands that shape, enact and reproduce the same gestures over and over, throughout the course of time. In the halting upheavals of film, Yasmina Benabderrahmane’s work leads us to a sensitive, mineral, instinctive vision of Moroccan history, with dripping stones and coagulated blood, and where the artist’s gaze is posed upon the intimacy of passing time.
