BAAB
BEYOND AUDIOVISUAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL BOUNDARIES
SESSION 2026 : APPLICATION
ABSTRACT
Descent is an experimental documentary project exploring SWANA Jewish–Arab identity in French-ruled Morocco. Hybridizing sculpture and film, the project embeds documentary sources in custom-built audio-visual apparatuses designed for single viewers and develops site-specific documentary methods. It aims to produce a multifaceted account of how political regimes remake both terrain and perception (of site and self).
The project’s main protagonists are the mountain Oukaïmeden in the High Atlas outside Marrakesh — the colonial-era ski resort on its slopes, which overlays a site of Neolithic rock art — and my grandmother, Renée Bitton (b. 1931/32), who, as a Darija-speaking Jewish girl from Marrakesh’s Jewish ghetto (the Mellah), was taken to the mountain on school ski trips. Her early memories of snow, skiing, and colonial assimilation and acculturation on these “civilizing” vacances à la française form a throughline of the project. Capturing a moment before her composite Arab-Jewish identity was ruptured, the project resists hermetic fusions of nationalism and biography and dwells in the foreclosed possibilities of an identity historically and politically positioned as obsolete.
At Oukaïmeden, multiple colonial modes of seeing converge: the archaeologist’s systematic mapping, the tourist’s panoramic gaze, the schoolgirl’s eye. Each produces different claims about authenticity and truth, which Descent destabilizes by layering. Rather than presenting documentary materials as either evidence or spectacle, the project creates a decolonial viewfinder by embracing Roger Caillois’s concept of ilinx — a voluntary surrender to vertigo in which stable categories of truth, memory, and identity temporarily dissolve. This destabilizing experience mirrors both the physical sensation of skiing and the cultural vertigo of colonial education, where Arab-Jewish children played at being French in an artificial Alps.
CONTENT/CONTEXT
French interventions at Oukaïmeden began in the early 1930s. Groups such as the Club Alpin Français first established ski paths and a mountain refuge in the mid-1930s, followed by development by the French military later in the decade. The 8th Zouave Battalion installed a fil-neige (tow-lift) in 1948, and French colonial authorities constructed téléskis, roadways, and a chalet in the early 1950s using local Amazigh laborers. This faux-French Alpine environment functioned both as a seasonal retreat for European colonists and as part of a broader project of colonial education and acculturation.
Archival materials document organized excursions and activity at the site. French authorities, including the Ministry of Sport (Service de la Jeunesse et des Sports), established sport institutions, ski schools, instructor training, youth programs, and school competitions at Oukaïmeden. It is likely that through one of these semi-official efforts my grandmother, along with her classmates at the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Marrakech’s Jewish ghetto, was brought to the mountain as a young teenager to learn to ski.
Descent investigates how these early embodied memories of colonial initiation — of snow, of skiing, of the mountain — map onto the formation of hybrid identities in which religion, language, ethnicity, and gender come into friction in ways official colonial narratives do not account for. I deliberately focus on the figure of an Arab-Jewish schoolgirl to offer an account of empire from its margins, giving form to memories of a subject in the process of her own formation.
Neolithic carvings at Oukaïmeden attest to human habitation as far back as 4000 BCE and to the persistence of transhumance pastoralist grazing. Amazigh mountain villages continue to surround the site. Today, alongside the ski resort and archaeological landscape, Oukaïmeden is being developed as a bouldering destination and an amateur observatory operates from its summit. Descent approaches the mountain as a palimpsest of temporal regimes — prehistoric, colonial, and contemporary — examining how successive projects of inscription, extraction, and observation transform both the land and the conditions of perception through which it is known.
FORM/TREATMENT
Descent is a work of documentary sculpture. Its viewing devices reference and subvert pre-cinematic technologies that once delivered images of the colonies to Europe, using these historical forms to investigate how ways of seeing produce varying claims about authenticity and truth. Rather than privileging a single perspective, the project examines how their intersection offers new understandings of subject formation under coloniality. Through site-specific documentary methods, Descent materializes different regimes of vision in order to examine how the French transformation of the Moroccan landscape — physically, legally, culturally, and epistemologically — shaped formative experiences of identity and place.
Archival research into the colonial development of the ski resort, archaeological accounts of the site, and oral histories from those who lived alongside the mountain inform the fieldwork. The documentary intervention begins with the site itself: I use the Oukaïmeden ski-lift as a readymade camera dolly to generate circular panoramic footage that echoes both film reels and cycles of seasonal change. Filming unfolds across seasons using a range of tools, including custom twin-lens 3D cameras, 35mm stills and slides, and GoPro cameras. I record the site’s day-to-day realities alongside performance-based interventions, including restaging colonial archival photographs of labor and leisure and a reenactment of my grandmother’s ski lessons by her only direct matrilineal descendant — my daughter.
Prehistoric rock carvings serve as relief plates for graphite rubbings. I am drawn to rubbing as an early archaeological technique whose promise of indexical touch stands in productive friction with documentary’s claims to pictorial fidelity. I also work with the site’s observatory, deliberately misusing its telescopes for terrestrial observation and recording. The resulting visual, audio, and textual materials form the foundation of the project’s sculptural viewing devices — documentary film objects — which embed moving image, archival fragments, oral testimony, and field recordings within physical apparatuses built for intimate encounters.
ARTISTIC INTENTIONS
This project hybridizes sculpture and film to develop new forms of documentary practice. Descent embeds archival records, video, oral histories, and field recordings in custom-built screening apparatuses for single viewers, producing what I theorize as documentary sculptures.
The sculptures draw on pre-cinematic viewing devices — peep-shows, stereoscopes, and Kaiserpanoramas — that once delivered images of empire to European audiences. By reworking these historical forms, the project asks how the machinery of colonial vision might be critically repurposed to confront the erasures and ruptures it helped to produce. These apparatuses employ technologies of perceptual instability — one-way mirrors, bistable stimuli, optical effects, reenactments — creating encounters in which non-fiction materials resist fixity, authority, and singular interpretation.
This approach extends my long-standing engagement with the structures of cinema and the mechanics of viewing — technical, architectural, social, and conceptual — developed through years of experimental screenings, collaborative micro-cinema initiatives, and my ongoing project Cinema Balash. While much of my earlier work explored collective spectatorship through custom-built screening environments, Descent deliberately turns toward an intimate mode of encounter grounded in the history of single-viewer apparatuses. In an era defined by individualized screens and fragmented attention, this return to one-to-one spectatorship does not reproduce isolation, but instead cultivates a form of ethically charged looking — one that asks how we come to form our sense of place, memory, identity, and belonging.
By critically examining modes of internalization, Descent makes intimate elegies to erased futures and proposes new directions for interdisciplinary documentary practice between film and sculpture.