Organic Knowledge

The project aims to constitute a collaborative archive documenting the material and immaterial culture of migrant communities in the Maghreb.

Organic Knowledge.jpg
Organic Knowledge.jpg

ORGANIC KNOWLEDGE aims to constitute a collaborative archive documenting the material and immaterial culture of migrant communities in the Maghreb.

Research and creation residencies involving three artist-researcher duos are organized in that sense, in three regions in Morocco.

The main objectives of the project are:

  • Advocate for a more inclusive understanding of contemporary inter-African and inter-Maghreb migration using tools from the fields of arts and research in a desire to deconstruct stereotypes.
  • Draw attention to the living conditions of migrant populations in Morocco, taking into consideration a range of issues in an intersectional approach: gender, institutional racism, discrimination, social justice, systemic violence.
  • Document personal stories and ways of life developed by migrant communities to survive, adapt and continue, in order to produce new narratives about migration.

The result of these artistic residencies will be presented in the form of a public program (exhibition, meetings, mediation) at the LE 18 Derb El Ferrane, Marrakech. An online platform is conceived in parallel with the project, taking the form of an online exhibition and a collaborative archive celebrating and documenting the culture of migrant communities with a desire to be anchored in the present, but also intended for the future.

Project updates:

Click here to read a blog post from the project

Meet the team:

Yemoh Odoi.JPG
Yemoh Odoi

Yemoh Odoi is a Ghanaian artist-activist, the artistic director and founder of The Minority Globe. His main interests involve under-represented communities rights and empowerment, climate and social justice and popular education. The Minority Globe uses artistic methodology, cultural practice and the therapeutic role of art as tools for reflection, action and advocacy on migration issues.

As an artist, he participated in several exhibitions including Organic Knowledge (2021), Out of the Blue Map, Mahal Art Space, Tangier, and Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht (2021). He has also published his writings and poetry in several publications and reviews such as On Drifting (Calypso 3621, 2021) or the militant platform LeMigrant (2009-14). The figure of the artist-activist or the artist-citizen is at the heart of Yemoh Odoi's practice. The artist documents the life of migrant communities in Morocco, among which he himself is an active member. Between documentary stories and fiction, his art illustrates an art deeply rooted in daily life.

Yemoh Odoi is in 2022-23 the recipient of the South Designs Grant for his project Re-imagi(nations). 

Emeka Okereke by Ayotola Tehingbola.jpg
Emeka Okereke

Emeka Okereke is a Nigerian visual artist and scholar who lives and works between

Lagos and Berlin, moving from one to the other on a frequent basis. A past member of the renowned Nigerian photography collective Depth of Field (DOF), he holds a bachelor’s/master’s degree from the Ecole Nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris and has exhibited in biennales and art festivals in cities across the world, notably Lagos,

Bamako, Cape Town, London, Berlin, Bayreuth, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Brussels, Johannesburg, New York, Washington, Barcelona, Seville, Madrid and Paris. In 2015, his work was exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale, in the context of an installation titled A Trans-African Worldspace.

Okereke is the founder and artistic director of Invisible Borders Trans-African Project. He is also the founder and host of the Nkata Podcast Station. Okereke has served as guest/visiting lecturer in several art platforms and learning institutions – notably Hartford University’s MFA program in photography and Summer Academy of Fine Arts, Salzburg

Austria and Sandberg Institut Amsterdam. Emeka Okereke is a 2020 – 2022 Jane Lombard Fellow at the Vera List Centre. He is also a visiting scholar/lecturer at the Indiana University Bloomington, USA and the University of Arts (UDK) Berlin. He has been recently named 2022 National Geography Explorer.

M Krishnamurthy.jpeg
Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Mathangi Krishnamurthy is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. She holds a PhD in anthropology from The University of Texas at Austin, and was an Andrew W.Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her areas of interest include the anthropology of work and gender, and medical anthropology. Her book "1-800-Worlds: The Making of the Indian Call Centre Economy" published by Oxford University Press in 2018 chronicles the labour practices, life-worlds, and media atmospheres of Indian call centre workers. She has also been a columnist for the blog 3quarksdaily and The Hindu, and writes occasionally on cultural production and practices for popular press.

Wiame Haddad.jpeg
Wiame Haddad

Wiame Haddad is an artist. Her current research focuses on bodies forgotten by History, in the form of a photographic and cinematographic study, underpinned by ethical and formal concerns. Her works are often the result of an immersion in a territory, a community or a culture. This research is nourished by everything that highlights the way in which the body expresses a situation of confinement, inner conflict, or conflict caused by historical or social context. Among her recent projects: Hors-Titre, Cinéma du Réel, Tiff Toronto, Open City Documentary London (2022), A propos d’une chambre occupée (vision d’une soirée d’octobre 1961), If a tree falls in a forest , Les Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles (2022) and Cinima 3, LE 18, Marrakech (2020), In absentia, Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris (2021), Ceux qui restent, Qalqalah: more than one language, at Crac from sète, France (2021).

Omar Berrada headshot - photo by Sarah Riggs.jpeg
Omar Berrada

Omar Berrada is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum, and the editor or co-editor of several books, including Album: Cinémathèque de Tanger, about film in Tangier and Tangier on film; The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa; and La Septième Porte [The Seventh Gate], a posthumously published history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani. Berrada’s writing was included in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, The University of California Book of North African Literature, and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. He currently lives in New York.

Mbarek Bouhchichi.jpeg
M’barek Bouhchichi

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from the Centre Pédagogique Régional, Rabat, and has taught art since the mid-1990s, first in Tiznit and now in Tahannaout where he resides. Through installations, paintings, drawings and video, his work makes space for oppressed existences. He also archives traditional craft practices and foregrounds the act of making, as a way to question cultural hierarchies and established divisions of labor and value. His work has recently been exhibited at Dak’art (Dakar), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), Kulte Gallery and Editions (Rabat), Goodman Gallery (Cape Town), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Mu.Zee (Ostend), Selma Feriani Gallery (Tunis), among others.

the-minority-globe.png
The Minority Globe

The Minority Globe uses artistic methodology, cultural practice and the therapeutic role of art as tools for reflection, action and advocacy on migration issues. Officially declared in Morocco in 2016, The Minority Globe has been operating in the field as a company since 2009.

The association acts in favor of invisible and under-represented people in the community such as vulnerable women, single mothers, precarious young people and unaccompanied minors.

The Minority Globe has the following objectives:

  • Create forms of artistic participation – arts in the public space mainly – aiming to create links of solidarity between the Moroccan and migrant population.
  • Develop educational and inclusive tools adapted to the needs of communities.
  • Support emerging migrant and Moroccan artists.
cropped-lblend-logo-03.png
L’blend

“L’blend” is a Moroccanised version of “The Blend”. We blend art, technology and entrepreneurship, to create a platform that drives social change. L’blend Creative Space is a production unit. Our local youth is drowning in inactivity. Owing to that fact, we work on exposing them to the three fields of arts, technology, and entrepreneurship, which we strongly believe are central pillars of social change. And so, as we educate them about these three fields, each depending on their primary interest, we emerge them in an environment that supports them, nurtures their skills, and unleashes their full potential. As a result, we move from education to production.

We founded L’blend creative space to establish a culture of creation. We hope to give our local youth the mindset to look at problems from a perspective with which they can create solutions. We aim to counter the culture of inactivity that has struck our generation. We want to give them more than just a space on land. We want to give them an experience, through which, they can conciliate with who they truly are. All with the hope of seeing them create their own initiatives to create a positive impact.

We are creating a space we have had the chance to see elsewhere, and as we believe our youth deserves it, we took the initiative to create it. Our biggest strength, and at the same time responsibility, is the values this space endorses. The space is a place where the respect of universal values is a fundamental pillar for our inside relations, which will surely influence our apostates’ behavior outside.

Capture_536.PNG
LE 18, derb el Ferrane

LE 18 is a multidisciplinary cultural and residency space established in 2013 and located in the medina of Marrakech (Morocco). It aims to provide time and space for research, creation, encounter, mutual learning and the crosspollination of knowledge. The space has developed organically and through a collaborative, open ethos, (un)learning from and in dialogue with the various communities it works with, in an institutional practice based on horizontality and collaboration.

Engaging with a fluid network of collaborators and a variety of formats including exhibitions, residencies, conversations, workshops, and publications, LE 18 has become a collective learning platform. One which permits it to listen to, and critically tackle the multiple dynamics, processes, and infrastructures which shape the cultural, political, and economic lives of our local ecosystem and its place in a global dynamic.

Currently, our long-term axes of research and platforms consist of photography and image-making in Morocco and Northern Africa; the politics and poetics of water and commoning; ancestral oral art, rural art history and practice; cultural decolonisation and decentralization ; processes of reactivation of collective memory and participative archiving; food sovereignty, culinary cultures, and communal gardening; independent publishing; and processes conducive to collective-making.

logo-amca-web_logo_9f964001-da0d-4cc8-8e7a-801dbcd3056e.gif
Association AMCA

Association Achbals of Cultural and Artistic Morocco - AMCA- is a Moroccan non-profit CSO located in Oujda in the Oriental region. Since its creation in 2013, AMCA’s main vocation has been to promote the effective citizen participation of young women and men as actors of sustainable development through the mechanisms of cultural and sports entrepreneurship in the urban sector.

AMCA's mission is to support the socio-economic and socio-cultural inclusion of young emerging talents, women and men, through the mechanisms of cultural and sports entrepreneurship incubation in the urban sector.

DARNA.png
Association Darna

Darna association carries out socio-educational and cultural actions against the exclusion of disadvantaged people, in particular young people and women, in order to promote their integration into active, professional and social life. Darna brings together several socio-educational and cultural reception structures, dedicated to children and women in difficulty: The Community Center for young people, known as the "Blue House", the Night shelter for children, The Educational Farm of Ziaten, The Community Center of the woman, the home for young girls Habiba Amor, and the Theater of Darna.

The Maison Communautaire des Jeunes (MCJ) or "Blue House" which operates like a vocational training school, welcomes between 120 and 150 children aged 8 to 17, supervised by about twenty educators who provide them with a rich variety of training in six professional workshops, focusing on carpentry, tailoring, baking, computing, ceramics and photography. Most of the children have dropped out of school for various reasons and devote themselves to odd jobs: street vendors, guides, beggars, servants, etc. 

The Maison Communautaire de la Femme (MCF), with an area of 650 m2, located near the Place du Grand Socco, is open to some 300 women over the age of 16, generally in difficulty: single mothers, divorced women, etc. . It is a meeting and listening space where these women can break with their isolation and regain self-confidence through educational and therapeutic work based on literacy and training courses: modern textile manufacturing and traditional, Weaving, restoration.

The educational farm has a vocation to fight against the phenomenon of rural exodus, through the reintegration of children. They are thus taught the trades of the land with a view to reintegrating them into farms, nurseries. The Darna Theater is located in the Fendak Chejra district, near the Grand Socco.