For Liverpool Arab Arts Festival 2022 we are pleased to be collaborating with A.MAL on two special online events:
Working with Family Archives from North Africa
Online panel discussion
Monday 11 July
5pm BST
This event will be-streamed on LAAF’s social media platforms.
Photographs, videos, recipes as well as poems and songs all exist as our own personal archives. How are these archives accessed, who has access and what are the ethics of working with them (or not)?
Multifaceted objects and visual documents, which are enmeshed in Europe’s colonial interventions in North Africa and its postcolonial resonances are held in family archives. Artists and researchers from North Africa and its globally dispersed diaspora as well as from the formerly coloniser countries return to these objects to access not only a part of family history, but also to take a glance at historically determined asymmetric relations between the Global North and the Global South.
Moderated by Jessica El Mal, A.MAL presents a discussion into this topic from the perspective of food historian Salma Serry of Sufra Kitchen, artist Imane Zoubai and media scholar Elodie Sacher. The diverse perspectives offered by the panel offer timely insight into the use of family archives.
For more information please visit: www.arabartsfestival.com/events/a-mal-presents-working-with-family-archives-from-north-africa/
Working with Family Archives, An Encounter
Online workshop
Sat July 16
11:00am – 1:00pm BST
BOOK HERE
Jessica El Mal and Elodie Sacher of A.MAL will guide you through a digital space for a fruitful exchange about exemplary approaches to working with family archives. Workshop participants will be invited to upload something from their family archive into a Google Drive before the workshop – this could be a picture, a recipe, a video, an audio track – anything. During the workshop, we will explore these items through discussion and writing activities, to question if and how we can encounter such objects, and what this means for the future.
For more information visit: https://www.arabartsfestival.com/events/working-with-family-archives-an-encounter/
A.MAL is an art and research initiative exploring ecology, migration and globalization through speculative art and research projects. We cast a critical eye on past and present global issues while seeking to harness human connection and creativity to imagine a better, more hopeful future – always questioning, always exploring. We are keen to contextualize ecological concerns within contemporary global – in particular post-colonial – relations and climate justice in the context of North Africa.
It creates opportunities for collaboration and experimentation through paid artist residencies, paying for workshops and talks, and touring exhibitions across Europe/North Africa. We bring emerging artists and mid-career artists and creatives from Europe, North Africa and the diaspora, to engage in reciprocal learning and experience sharing.
A.MAL have collaborated with ONCA (Brighton, UK), International Lost Species Day, Dardishi (Scotland), P21 Gallery (London), Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (UK), The Arab British Center (London), Le Cube (Rabat), Pikala Bikes (Marrakech), Mahal (Tangiers) and the Africa/UK: Transforming Art Ecologies from New Art Exchange (Nottingham), as well as a wide network of individual artists across Morocco and Europe.
Image: Grandfather’s photo album picturing his travels through Morocco in the 1960s, courtesy of Elodie Sacher.