Samir Laghouati-Rashwan

Residency report
During his residency, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan developed a video project with a choreographic and sonic vocabulary based on Lebanese/Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage’s work, The Wolf and the Muslim, an essay that links the ecological crisis with Islamophobia, likening the wolf to the Arab or the migrant. Through this theme, Laghouati-Rashwan explored an entity that is “neither/half-wolf, neither/half-human” which would claim its spatial and sonic territory around La Becque. Entitled AM I HUMAN?, this residency project originates from a reflection on the marginalization of dogs, which are considered dangerous, and of Arab and Black men in Western contexts, bringing together social marginalization and human domination over nature.

Biography
Based in Marseille, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan is a French/Moroccan/Egyptian artist and performer who creates narratives from archives, utilizing mediums such as film, photography, and sculpture. His work explores the politics of space and bodies, with a particular focus on representations of individuals from diasporas within mediated cultural productions and institutional artistic spaces. Creating situations that are both realistic and phantasmagorical with a tone that oscillates between amusement and vulnerability, he traces marginalized or forgotten histories and explores geographical displacement and linguistic reappropriation as evidence of systems of domination.

Laghouati-Rashwan has exhibited and performed in galleries and institutions such as P21 Gallery (London), Material (Mexico City), Les Urbaines (Lausanne), CAC Brétigny (Brétigny), Kadist Foundation (Paris), Magasins Généraux (Pantin), 100% L’expo (Paris), Eliane Projects (Bordeaux), Fondation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz at the Rencontres de la Photographie (Arles), Biennale Manifesta 13 (Marseille), Triangle-Astérides (Marseille), Art-O-Rama Fair (Marseille), and SISSI club (Marseille).