Kicking off this week is the 4th Marrakech Biennale. The opening days will see performances, debates, talks and screenings as well as the opening of the main ‘Higher Atlas’ visual arts exhibition. “Through partnerships with African and international voices,” the Biennale hopes to “promote the status of the artist and contemporary culture in North Africa and to dynamize the regional creative scene.” Looking at the list of artists participating in the Higher Atlas exhibition, one could get the impression the intended “dialogues that [will] produce new, consensual realities” will most likely reflect a North Atlantic triangular reality with a tiny Moroccan base, since most of the contributing artists are European or American. The Moroccan artists that were included are Younes Baba-Ali, Faouzi Laatiris and Hassan Darsi. South of Morocco, they seem to have only found one artist: Pascale Marthine Tayou. So much for the African voices.

Among the movies scheduled to show in the Biennale’s film section are the dubious ‘I Am Slave’ (from 2010; Basia promises to put up a review soon), Moroccan Narjiss Nejjar’s new film ‘L’Amante du Rif’ but also writer and director Hicham Lasri’s first feature, ‘The End’, set in a postapocalyptic 1999, on the eve of the death of King Hassan II:

In the literature section, we find writers Latifa Baqa, Omar Berrada, Zahia Rahmani, Abderrahim Elkhassar and litfest veterans Ben Okri and Rian Malan.

Anybody in Marrakech to give us some feed-back? The Official Parallel Projects look interesting.

Further Reading

After the uprising

Following two years of mass protest, Kenya stands at a crossroads. A new generation of organizers is confronting an old question: how do you turn revolt into lasting change? Sungu Oyoo joins the AIAC podcast to discuss the vision of Kenya’s radical left.

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.