Youssef Taki Oujda, Morocco, b. 1995
Out of Place stems from the need to piece together a broken memory, to gather the scattered fragments of a family history. The work traces a path that begins at the intimate root of remembrance and unfolds toward the forms that memory takes when it is interwoven with the collective narrative. In this journey, the personal becomes a mirror of the shared, and the everyday—like the family album, the verbal record, or the smallest affections—opens up to a constellation of displaced connections, encapsulated in a suspended image, a captured gesture, the fragility of an archive.
The work inhabits the margins and unwritten pages of the official narrative. The yellowed and forgotten pages of old books, worn by time, become surfaces for piecing together fragments of suspended memories. Over dreamlike spaces, on a shared horizon, a wind of sand—made of exiles and losses—sweeps them away, leaving behind an earthy trail of shadows, of figures that once were. The faces that once called home—grandmothers, uncles, neighbors, or oneself as a child—dissolve into an aesthetic of loss, and with their figures, their faces also dissolve. In a journey toward a shared visual memory, this work is born in the individual and projects itself toward the collective.
Out of Place is, in both form and substance, a gesture of resistance against forgetting. An attempt to give visual form to affection, to that poignant, nostalgic trap left by displacement. At the same time, it is a subtle critique of the media's construction of migration: its reduction to statistics, headlines, and spectacle. Faced with this simplistic view, this work restores humanity through the delicacy of the fragment, the tenderness of the detail, the blurred language of paper and image. Out of Place invites us to pause on what is lost upon leaving, on the transformation of seeing from a distance. It is there, on that threshold, in that in-between space—in that state of being both inside and outside—that the work finds its poetic power.
Exhibitions
At the Image's Edge, AWL, Girona, Spain, 2025Out of Place , Colegio de España, Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, Paris, France, 2025
The Production of Otherness, curated by Maite Borjabad, organized by FAD, Barcelona, Spain, 2024-2025
The Larnaca Biennial, Home Away from Home , curated by Yev Kravt, Cyprus, 2023
I Pressed You Between the Leaves, curated by Emily Sun and Bernarda Antonia Nsi Ngua, Sala de Arte Joven, Madrid, Spain, 2022
