Once Upon a Place: What Remains of the Halqa? Performing Memory and Absence – Bodies Carrying Exhibit Programming

Description by Bouchra Assou and Salma Chouqair

Drawing from a post-colonial concern with the preservation of different forms of oral traditions in Morocco, this lecture performance seeks to restage a halqa as both a space and a conduit for ancestral storytelling, performance and communion.

The halqa, both evoking a space and a practice, serves as the epitome of narratology and the subversive oral histories of Moroccan heritage. Exploring the intersections between space, body and practice and treating the memories they hold as a form of resistance to authoritarian/colonial power, this lecture performance will centre the role of the halqa and its role in preserving and transmitting traditions in their visual and auditory manifestations such as theatre, storytelling, carnivalesque practices, music (tagnawit), etc. Furthermore, we will explore the cinematic and literary languages that seek to disrupt, challenge, and dismantle hegemonic historical narratives using alternative modes of knowledge production, such as the ancient North African practices that encompass a form of storytelling beyond text-image relationships

About the speakers

Bouchra Assou is an independent researcher, film curator, programmer, writer, and archivist of Moroccan origin based in Montreal, Canada. She is the founder and curator of Dhakira Collective (2020): an independent research, archival and curatorial platform that foregrounds art, cinema, and music outside the western canon with a focus on cinema from the SWANA region (South West Asia & North Africa) and the co-founder and director of programming of the North African Queer Film Festival (2021) : a community-driven platform dedicated to celebrating and supporting films by, about, and for North African queers, powered by Dhakira Collective. She was invited to deliver lectures on North African cinema and archives by Concordia University, McGill University and The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). Press features about her work have appeared in publications such as Mille World, Journal de Métro, Also Cool Mag, The Link Newspaper etc.

Salma Chouqair is a freelance writer and an independent researcher of Moroccan Amazigh origin. She is currently pursuing a BFA Art History and Theology at Concordia University. In 2023, Salma launched Bayt Zuhal, an independent cultural platform dedicated to recollecting and preserving the traditions, arts and archives of Tamazgha & the post-colonial Maghreb with a focus on ancestral futurism. Since its inception, the project has amassed a global online community. Press features about Salma’s work and research were published in Dune Magazine, The Road to Nowhere and more recently The Link Newspaper and Dazed MENA.

Event language(s) English, French, Arabic & Darija