Driss Ouaamar draws a thread against forgetting
A graduate of the Beaux-Arts in Tétouan, Driss Ouaamar sets out to animate what no longer has a voice. Faced with a modernity that is gradually erasing stories and identities, he asks how marginalised communities reclaim their power to act.
“I grew up on stories that risked dying out before I could even understand them. In my village, the songs that called for rain fell silent when water and electricity arrived, while exile tore whole sections out of our collective memory. To counter this slow forgetting, I turned to art. First through cinema, at the Faculté polydisciplinaire in Ouarzazate, to catch the fleeting movement of life; then, when I joined the Beaux-Arts in Tétouan, I discovered comics, a medium that extends the language of cinema through its narrative framing and visual dynamism and that, like animation, breathes new life into the stories of my childhood.
Combining drawing, installation, virtual reality and video, I try to build bridges between fragments of memory and to give form to the invisible. This approach runs through two major projects: The Bride of the Rain recalls the ancestral rite of the women of my village, who once called on water to break the drought, while L’Empreinte de la diaspora, a virtual reality experience, retraces the journey of my grandfather, who left to work in the mines of the Pas-de-Calais on the strength of false promises. Modernity has consigned songs and beliefs to the past, but it has also reduced lives to silence and exile. My art is a fragile attempt to keep these stories from the dark.”