ABSTRACT
This interview was led with Franco-Maghrebi artists Badr El Hammami and Mohammed Laouli. Based in Marseille, they both produce works that convey a conception of the decolonization of knowledge. Since the beginning of the 2000s, Badr El Hammami and Mohammed Laouli have both developed representations of colonial histories that attempt to overcome restrictive nationalist visions of identity in the Maghreb and endorse transnational approaches that are determined by their complex identities.
In the summer of 2020, Marseille has been the stage of movements of decolonizing colonial heritage in the wake of the Black Lives Matter struggles. These events have had direct impact on their longstanding productions and reflexions about memory erasure and epistemic colonization. The interview especially aims to gather the artists’ responses to the issues of the monument as a persistent expression of the political matrices that governed the past. As the artists reveal, thinking about the past and the local space is always a connected to processes aimed at denouncing unequal relationships of the present, following the quest of social and memorial justice and of imagining societies that are more concerned with the place of the individual.
