Sand Archive

I found a bag of random film rolls and discovered a few green-tinted color negatives from my father’s travels in the Southeast of Morocco. Talilouine is where my grandfather and his children grew up, a place where Amazigh culture and languages like Tachelhit (North African language) were more prevalent than Darija (Moroccan Arab dialect).

I always had the ambition to properly document my family’s archives. When we arrived in 1997 on a direct flight from Casablanca, we didn’t have much, but we had a lot of pictures and a few blankets. Growing up we had analog cameras hanging around our homes, and my dad instilled in me a love for photography and still images.

As I spend time with these pictures, the landscape and environment become an opportunity for reinterpretation, through my own incomplete understanding of the context. My father’s pictures were taken on his trips back to the country to reconnect with the village where he was born. Recovering what could have been forgotten.

While finding photographs of my family’s native land, following the traces of my father and grandfather, I am learning more about Amazigh symbols by modeling them in 3D software. Transcribing these symbols and digitizing the pictures offers me a path to trace back his steps and map his souvenirs. The symbols summoned in this installation are about a life force often referenced with symbols linked to the earth: energy from labour of the earth, patience, bravery, resilience, and movement. The work of preserving memories never ends.