Yasmina Benabderrahmane: La Bête, Super-8 films across Morocco

La Bête – A Modern Tale

In 2012 Benabderrahmane returned to Morocco, her family's home country, after twelve years away, crossing dunes and plains to make Super-8 films mapping a landscape in the middle of changing. The book collects stills from those films, and the sequence follows a path that winds between tradition and modernity rather than choosing between them.

Two places anchor it. The Bouregreg Valley, a new cultural centre, stands for the modernity and the changing physiognomy of ancestral land. Further out are the desert plains of Chichaoua, rocky and stripped back, where sleepy villages sit in a place that appears to have stopped keeping time. The contradiction between the two is the subject: contemporary Morocco is played out across both, and the work refuses to resolve it into either progress or loss.

What Benabderrahmane offers instead is a sensory and mineral history — stones tumbling, blood clotting — in which the artist's gaze arrives at a place that is at once familiar and permanently in motion. The book was published by MACK in January 2020, and the accompanying exhibition ran at Le Bal in Paris from 13 January to 12 April 2020.

The body, the taboo and the beauty institute

Benabderrahmane has described the tension her practice grew out of directly. She comes from part of a practising Muslim family in which representation of the body is regarded as sacrilege, and she is also the daughter of a hairdresser who grew up in a beauty institute. The relationship to the body was always a taboo at home.

That dichotomy — the modest body in the intimate sphere against the public body — is, in her account, a source of astonishment and fascination, and it produces the aim she states for the work: to show what is not seen, and to divert what is.

Training, prizes and the commission behind the book

Born in 1983 in Rueil-Malmaison, Benabderrahmane graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2009 and from Le Fresnoy, the national contemporary art studio, in 2015. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions including the 54th Salon de Montrouge in 2009 and Jeune Création at CENTQUATRE in 2013.

In 2019 she was named winner of the ADAGP Prize at Le Bal for young creation, an award for photographers and video artists under forty living in Europe. Its structure is the reason the book and the exhibition exist in the form they do: rather than rewarding a finished series, the prize accompanies the recipient for two years in completing a project already begun. Her resulting project, À bras le corps, was exhibited at Le Bal in January 2020 and published by MACK as La Bête – A Modern Tale.

For anyone reading this archive for practical reasons, that sequence is worth noting. A completion award with a two-year horizon produced both a museum exhibition and a book from a body of Super-8 material that had been accumulating since 2012.

The choice of Super-8 is doing more than establishing a texture. Shooting a changing landscape on a domestic film format from another era puts the medium and the subject in the same condition — obsolescent, still working — and it is why the still images collected in the book read as extractions from a memory rather than as photographs of a place.

The twelve-year absence is the other structural fact of the work, and it cuts against the usual grain of return narratives. A photographer who grows up inside a place documents its change as erosion, one familiar thing at a time; one who returns after twelve years meets the change all at once, as a stranger with family memory. La Bête is built from that second position — close enough to know what the Bouregreg Valley replaced, distant enough to see the new cultural quarter as a fact rather than a wound. The book's refusal to grieve or to celebrate is therefore not neutrality; it is an accurate record of what a diasporic return actually feels like, where the modern and the ancestral belong to the same inheritance and neither can be disowned.