Youssef Taki Oujda, Morocco, b. 1995
Opposing Pages places pages side by side within the same narrative, which should not be understood as opposing pages, but rather contrasting ones; not as contrary, but as diverse, meant to be read together, intertwined. These pages, which constitute the work, carry an obsolete narrative, taken from Gustave Le Bon's The Civilization of the Arabs (1884), an approach that reduces the other to a mere object of study, treating them as something alien, using a clearly reductionist language imbued with a clear sense of moral and cultural superiority. Anthropological, sociological, and cultural studies, viewed from a supposed objectivity and a prism of superior culture, distance us from one another. The dehumanizing language, which identifies them as barbaric or savage entities, is superimposed in this work with real images of real people, migrants who have lost part of their history and memory. The images that these words bury in this work are found on lost devices of migrants, cameras, mobile phones, memory cards and hard drives, from which everyday moments are rescued, moments of anonymous lives that place us all on the same lines of a common story, they unite us.
The superimposition of the image onto a text already established in the official narrative, in history, creates tension with lost memories, those that, most likely, were destined to fade, to disappear without a trace. This subjectivization of the narrative, of the small entities that compose it, opens the space for a dialogue about the dispossession of memories and narratives, about the individual resistances that, when united, forge community.
Exhibitions
At the Image's Edge, AWL, Girona, Spain, 2025Opposite Pages, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Real, Spain, 2025The Production of Otherness, curated by Maite Borjabad, organized by FAD, Barcelona, Spain, 2024-2025
