As part of the Cultural Season France-Morocco 2018, The French Institute of Morocco organizes the 11th edition of the International Rencontres of Fez, Morocco taking place from 30 November to 20 December 2018.

21 artists from 13 nationalities
Curated by Mohamed Thara

The 2018 edition aims to question the medium, to explore the notion of territory and the new uses of contemporary photography. The artistic direction was entrusted this year to Mohamed Thara, visual artist, research professor at the University of Bordeaux-Montagne and associate member of the transdisciplinary research laboratory CLARE-ARTES of the Doctoral School Montaigne-Humanités. Like every edition, many activities are offered to fans of photography, including exhibitions, screenings, workshops and debates. The exhibition is presented in various cultural spaces scattered between the new city and the medina around the theme « Beyond the territories« . It is a question of multiplying the crossings of looks in a system of exchange from one place to another. By establishing bridges between the French and Moroccan scenes. This year’s edition features a set of photographs that show the plurality of current forms of expression. The photographs bear the trace and exhibit territories with precarious balances, in tension between the dejection of the soil and the freedom of the summits. From this, the borders become uncertain, the categories are abolished. Photography as the territory is the subject of incessant metamorphoses, boundaries and lines of demarcation, inner or outer are questioned by the artists in a double movement of belonging and decentering.

« To see differently, we see something else, » said Heinrich Wölfflin. It is precisely this « something else » that the new edition of the Rencontres de Fès, which is an observatory of photographic practices and current creation, seeks to open up to the world. By circulating images this edition intends to circulate ideas and create new dynamics. Photographers are storytellers and explorers in search of new territories, they testify to the upheavals of the world question the medium. By bringing together a complementary visual cosmology, and works with similar concerns, the exhibition « Beyond the territories » intends to interrogate the photography of territories and to restore it within the vast field of contemporary practice where the images interact with each other. with others within the geographical space. Every territory is a frontier, it builds and deconstructs, between line of flight, crack, fracture, edge, it creates margin, fence, zone, ghetto. How to go from here to there? Between there and here? Between the outside and the inside? The danger is indeed in the heart of the crossing. We forget that a territory is almost always the scene of personal or collective conflicts, visible or invisible. This year’s edition will attempt to identify « territorial issues » and to include the viewer in a device open to other possible narratives. The question of the experience of the territory crosses all the exhibition, one thus passes from a description to an inscription in the images to recall that an image remains above all a mental representation.

By confronting the eyes of international photographers (Marc Montméat, Jonathan Hindson, Nicolas Camoisson, Benoit Cary, Bruce Milpied) and national (Hicham Gardaf, Yassine Alaoui Ismaili, Mustafa Azeroual, Zakaria Ait Wakrim, M’hammed Kilito, Mohamed Thara) A young Moroccan movement of independent photography is emerging through the exhibition and is eager for new experiences. In a state of emergency related to the current crisis of unprecedented scale, this movement is characterized by the relationship to the human, it often deals with complex social and political issues that infuse into the relationship with the photographic narrative that is also the story of Morocco today. In a territory facing its own contradictions, photography becomes a means of collective resilience, an expression of a resistance instinct, which makes us think of the words of postcolonial studies theorist Homi Bhabha « the state of emergency is still a state of emergence « . Photography remains a powerful tool for questioning, it often sets a scintillating light, transcendent, which in the distance, allows to maintain the emergence of a glimmer of hope.

The artists

Bruce Milpied (France), Hicham Gardaf (Morocco / United Kingdom), Michael Macgarry (South Africa), Marc Montméat (France), Ismaïl Bahri (Tunisia / France), Halida Boughriet (Algeria / France), Mustapha Azeroual (Morocco / France), Nicolas Camoisson (France / Syria), Yassine Alaoui Ismaili (Morocco), Zakaria Ait Wakrim (Spain / Morocco), Mohamed Thara (Morocco / France), Jonathan Hindson (South Africa / France), Fenia Kotsopoulou (Greece / United Kingdom), Benoit Cary (France), Edgar Endress (Chile / USA), Mathilde Lavenne (France), NG’Endo Mukii (Kenya / United Kingdom), Isabel Pérez del Pulgar (Spain), M’hammed Kilito (Morocco), Michele Manzini (Italy), Faical Ben (Morocco)

Venues

Gallery of the French Institute of Fez
Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef Cultural Complex
Foundouk Space Chemmaïne Space
Dar Batha Space
Cinema Boujloud
Media library of the French Institute of Fez