Over
For the multidisciplinary programme When facing erasure... Joachim Ben Yakoub and AZ OOR from The Kitchen propose a listening session around the story of Ahl El Hijra, an art group of young Maghrebi active in Brussels during the 1970s.
Inspired by the movement of birds, Ahl El Hijra (re)presented their collectivity in the form of al-halqa — Moroccan for ''the circle'' and referring to a form of people's theatre in public space, an audience circle in the middle of which is the Helayqi (storyteller). For Ahl El Hijra, this form allowed a swarm of stories to interweave in a state of permanent suspension.
Today it is not the purpose to resurrect Ahl El Hijra, but to bring back its immaterial dimension, withdrawn through subtle forms of historiographic erasure. By sharing our first steps in our collective research, we hope to open the fractal possibility of movement within movement.
about
Joachim Ben Yakoub is an art worker, sometimes operating as writer, sometimes as curator or dramaturg, mostly in the Kitchen, a collective study and workspace in Brussels. He works at Sint-Lucas Antwerp, where he promotes and conducts research in the arts as part of the SLARG research group, and where he teaches aesthetic theories. Joachim Ben Yakoub also works at erg in Brussels (École de recherche graphique) where he facilitates research in the arts.
https://www.firstwaves.be/
AZ OOR is a visual artist, storyteller, and poet. An auto-proclaimed Amazigh Futurist, he advocates for a poetic resurgence of indigenous consciousness. By contemplating and listening to events, orality, archival material, plants, bestialities, ethnographical sludge, viral thoughts, cinematic crufts, and literary figures, AZ OOR’s visual vernacular oscillates between quasi-theater forms, fragmented texts, and scenographic vocality to articulate a living vocabulary for an Amazigh future that hasn’t yet happened and a nostalgia for something that didn’t exist.
https://www.instagram.com/az_oor_/
The Kitchen is a place always in the making located in the center of Brussels. It is an assembly of sorts, where different artists, curators and researchers share their work, cook, and hang out, but also do some work, broadcasting, reprinting, redistributing and studying. It is a space for collective study and memorial, bringing together collectives to study and create, experimenting with memories of solidarity from the global majority and its diaspora’s, but not only.
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The listening session is part of a Circles of Birds, a collective research Joachim Ben Yakoub is conducting together with AZ OOR and Sofyann Ben Youssef in the Kitchen, together with slarg.be, with the support of Moussem and Civa.
