Hallima Imane Zoubai celebrates the bond between people and their land
At the crossroads of sound art and geography, Halima Imane Zoubai turns to geomusicology as a way of revealing collective memory.
“At home there was a lot of singing. Music was everywhere, alive, in the voices, in the gestures. That atmosphere is what pushed me to join the conservatory, just below the Beaux-Arts in Tétouan where I was already developing my artistic practice. Very quickly art and music began to merge in my work. Rhythms became lines, melodies visual patterns. Soon I ran into a limit. Malhoun and Andalusian music dominated, but where were the songs of the Rif, the ones that told of my region, my land? That absence pushed me to look elsewhere, in archives, in dusty cassettes of popular music. That is where I discovered what scores could not capture: songs rooted in place, sounds that carried the memory of a landscape. Each song was, for me, a sound map, a crossing of local lands and cultures. Each piece becomes a fragment of collective memory, a celebration of the bond between people and their land. Today the search continues. I no longer want only to visualise this sound memory but to embody it through the body. Performance, gesture, the movement of the body are becoming my new tools.”