Witness Report #1: Agraw and "cinema from below"

During the first year of the Curatorial Programme Lumbung Practice and Sandberg Instituut's temporary master programme Lumbung Practice, Ilia Pellapaisiotou writes monthly Witness Harvests on the public events and the less visible happenings. Harvest means the documentation of meetings, which is prepared by harvesters as overviews, texts, sketches or drawings and enables the traceability of the meeting. The harvesters listen and reflect. In exaggerated, humorous, poetic or acedemic form, they document the process from their individual perspective and by means of their own artistic practices.

First up is a harvest on the lecture on agraw and "cinema from below" that filmmaker Nadir Bouhmouch and curator and researcher Soumeya Ait Ahmed gave at Ventilator Cinema in OT301, Amsterdam.

Over the 19th and the 20th of November 2024, the Lumbung Practice program welcomed the Tizintizwa Collective, of which members filmmaker Nadir Bouhmouch and curator and researcher Soumeya Ait Ahmed were present. The Lumbung Practice is an educational program that is organised by the curatorial programme at de Appel, the temporary masters program at Sandberg Instituut and Gudskul in Jakarta. The Lumbung Practice’s focus is geared towards taking the lumbung practices of documenta fifteen as a case study. Lumbung during documenta fifteen developed into a rhizomatic collective of collectives and the practice of decentralised collective redistribution, transforming the art institution and its exhibitionary logic.

As active participants of the documenta fifteen through the cultural and multidisciplinary residency space LE 18, Bouhmouch and Ait Ahmed drew parallels to lumbung, precisely its anchoring in values such as humor, generosity and collectivity. They presented how they themselves practiced such values in the making of Amussu; a film that was directed collectively with the community of Imider in Morocco. They presented segments of their two latest films (Amussu from 2019 and You’re There and I’m Here from 2020), while engaging in a discussion with the lumbung practice participants. The discussions took the form of an agraw; a practice of collectivity that traces its roots in the Amazigh community. The practice of agraw was central in the making of Amussu, as the collective explained, since the entirety of the community of Imider, regardless of age and gender, sat collectively in a circle and had an equal say and contribution in the making of the film. Putting agraw into effect in this case, the collective gathered in a circle with the lumbung participants, where everyone shared their thoughts and experiences on questions such as how to decentralise the power of the city and how to archive oral literature. Throughout the discussions that took place at Sandberg Instituut and OT301’s Ventilator Cinema, the distinction between art and folklore art dominated the discussion, as Bouhmouch and Ait Ahmed emphasised that in Morocco folklore art – as part of the commons – is seen by neoliberal institutions as the art of the poor. Opposing a top-down analysis of Moroccan history and culture, and drawing inspiration from the critique of neocolonialism in film, as initiated by the Third Wave cinema movement, the Tizintizwa Collective shared their experience in making “cinema from below” in an attempt to etch into memory a history as it was lived by the colonized and not as it was written by the colonizers.

Acknowledging the urgency to question such prevailing societal perceptions, Nadir and Soumeya utilise ‘oraliture’ as the tool to subvert the historical narrative of Morocco from that of the colonisers to that of the colonised, since “the event without its poem is an event that never happened”. In light of this discussion, they shared extracts of their most recent film titled You’re There and I’m Here, which, inspired by characteristics of third cinema, enacts their understanding of the importance of orality as a basis for decolonising aesthetic languages.