Handbook of the Spontaneous Other

In 2012, Benabderrahmane returned to her home country of Morocco after 12 years, crossing the dunes and plains to create photographs mapping out the ever-changing landscape. Her fi lm and photographic work, collected in this volume to accompany a solo exhibition at Le Bal in Paris, invite us to follow the path winding between tradition and modernity. We travel to the Bouregreg Valley, a new cultural centre which symbolizes the modernity and changing physiognomy of ancestral lands. Further afield, we discover the desert plains of Chichaoua, rocky and stripped back, where sleepy villages nestle in a place where time stands still. From these familiar spaces and bodies, in which the history of contemporary Morocco is played out with all its contradictions, Yasmina Benabderrahmane invites us to experience a sensitive, mineral and instinctive Moroccan history, where stones tumble, blood clots and where the artist's gaze comes to on a place at once familiar and changing.