Touda Bouanani

As visual artist and multidisciplinary videographer, memory and memories are at the heart of her work and research. With Conte de la énième nuit, 1993, she engages in the writing of video poems and video installations where her own writing intertwines with that of Georges Pérec, Jorge Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa and Ahmed Bouanani.

When she is a student at Les Beaux Arts of Bordeaux, she speaks frequently about the work of her father Ahmed Bouanani. She uses to present Le Mirage, his only feature film, on a VHS medium in its original version. She dubbs all the voices in French, reading on paper the translation by her father.

In 2006, a fire takes place in her family apartment of Rabat. Her father, exiles in the Atlas Mountains since the death of his younger daughter Batoul in 2003, then thinks that all his manuscripts were lost. With patience, Touda and her mother Naïma Saoudi, decorator and costume designer, dry the books, costumes, manuscripts and all papers, photos, etc. In the end, they find many manuscripts, scripts, novels, poems and short stories. To get an idea about their volume, Touda Bouanani put them in a wooden chest. The latter object is a decorative element of Ahmed Bouanani’s film Les quatre sources, 1977 where the hero discovers his inheritance in this same chest.

In 2010, she begins to represent her father for presentations of his films and his books. She makes a slideshow based on photographs where she presents at the same time his work and the work she does to preserve, list and disseminate his work. Since the death of her father in 2011, then of her mother in 2012, Touda Bouanani is confronted with the family archives and the many unpublished writings. In 2014, she realizes Fragments de mémoires, 20 minutes, where she makes a portrait of her father and family through her archives.

She produces a series of photographs with Francesco Apruzzi where she appears in remembrance places around the world. Beyond her concern with her father’s memory, she focuses on the importance of preserving the memory and work of artists and thinkers in Morocco and Africa.

Video links
• “Fiction 2”, 1997
• “Une Odyssée”, 2015, en collaboration avec Malik Nejmi

Press
• “Touda Bouanani, dialoguer avec la mémoire” interview with Roland Carré in Répliques n°8, 2017
• “Voyage à travers le temps” by Salima Belefkih in La dépêche du Maroc n°9, 2016