Leila Sadel

Leila Sadel was born in 1985, in Casablanca. She works and lives in Bègles.

“Faced with the unknown, a re-reading of the world, a questioning of our knowledge and achievements is necessary. To understand what escapes us, it is necessary to create new relations and make associations between things, even the most improbable ones.”

“My artistic journey is punctuated by moments of collecting elements.  The exploration of spaces, images, and objects enables the construction of narratives, which naturally expands and activates my reflection and work processes. These moments impose on me a time of observation and appropriation of the context where I find myself.

When we arrive in a city, an unknown country, we experience numerous changes and come to a certain state of wandering. It can be associated with movement, with aimless walking, with the idea of being off track that leads to a certain loss of the self. Nevertheless, it remains a search for landmarks and a quest for meaning and purpose. My approach is similar to this kind of voluntary wandering. It is an uncertain journey, strewn with questions, and enriched by encounters.

My work questions the idea of inhabiting a space: immersing yourself in it, investing it to adapt it to its size and rhythm. I go through and sometimes try to penetrate contexts that are foreign to me, to explore human experiences. I insert myself into the gaps: the voids and in-betweens, the gaps in stories, the off-screen in the images. I explore and project myself into these hollow spaces. They evoke stories, make it possible to appropriate the elements that surround them.

In my work, these collected iconographic and textual elements of the present and the past intersect. The devices I create can echo the mental images and journeys of each. The articulation of these singular elements borrowed from everyday life, in the form of photographs, installations, drawings, and videos, reveals the trace of these narratives, memories, and experiences.”

Leila Sadel

• Website of the artist
• Artistic file of Leila Sadel
• CV_Leila Sadel

Texts and press
• Texte about the project “Refuges” (1)
• Texte about the project “Refuges” (2)
• “Beside Memories” in Afrique in visu
• “Le Maroc entre deux rives” in Le Soir
• “Leila Sadel chez les résidents de Caillavet” in Sud Ouest
• “PhotoMed, des rives et des images” in Libération
• “Pourquoi ne parle-t-on plus d’apatrides, d’exil” in Sud Ouest
• “Têtes de l’art” in Libération
• “Nos vies ont, toutes en commun, un fond de silence” in Le Soir
• Texte à propos de l’exposition “Tout ce que l’on fait est sur fond de silence”
• Texte à propos du projet “Recoupements”
• Texte à propos de l’oeuvre “tracé(s)”