Online
Sat 29 Jan 2022 @ 18.00

Cities of Cultures: Sharing Practices of Storytelling between Casablanca and Coventry

Sat 29 Jan 2022 @ 18.00
Online
Duration: 60 mins
 

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Join us for the launch of Letters, a sound documentary assembling the voices of four people sharing experiences, ideas and reflections – at distance. 

During this one-hour live session on Zoom, Laura Nyahuye, Mounir Neddi, Soufiane Hennani, and melissandre varin will talk about their practices and experience of the residency. They will share their sound documentary for the first time, and invite questions from the audience. 

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Image credit: Mounir Neddi

About Cities of Cultures: Sharing Practices of Storytelling between Casablanca and Coventry

We are honoured to present Cities of Cultures: Sharing Practices of Storytelling between Casablanca and Coventry, a four-month digital residency with Laura Nyahuye, Mounir Neddi, Soufiane Hennani, and melissandre varin. During this residency, cultural practitioners investigated themes of translation, intimacy, correspondence, place-making, and transmissibility.

Join us for the launch of Letters, a sound documentary assembling the voices of four people sharing experiences, ideas and reflections – at distance. In a time of pandemic, with travel rendered impossible, and in the context of reinforced borders, we look for our own ways to relate to each other at the intersection of traditional and recent forms of interactions: letters were typed on computers, typewriters, or handwritten, including multiple languages, translation and objects…

During this one-hour live session, Laura Nyahuye, Mounir Neddi, Soufiane Hennani, and melissandre varin will talk about their practices and experience of the residency. They will share their sound documentary for the first time, and invite questions from the audience to inform our reflection on storytelling. 

Cities of Cultures: Sharing Practices of Storytelling between Casablanca and Coventry is an International Changemakers Bursary Project led by Lou Sarabadzic and Kenza Sefrioui. The International Changemakers Programme is a British Council project in partnership with Coventry City of Culture Trust.

About the participants

Image showing Laura Nyahuye with sunlight on her face looking up and away from the camera by Will Johnston

Image showing Laura Nyahuye with sunlight on her face looking up and away from the camera by Will Johnston

Laura Nyahuye

Laura Nyahuye is a Zimbabwean born artist who makes wearable body adornments. Her work challenges perceptions and addresses issues, to do with women and migrant communities, tokenism, marginalisation, discrimination which are real-life issues, affecting migrant communities. These topics are woven into Laura’s poetic writing and handmade body adornments.

Laura is driven by the desire to see a better tomorrow for the next generation, to see a flicker of hope in the eyes of a fellow woman and for communities to connect, despite race, language and religion.

Laura’s creative processes are very organic and responsive to circumstance and environment. Her techniques are mainly influenced by her African heritage. She hand weaves, construct, construe, found objects, fabrics, wires, plastics. Laura takes pride in hand making her pieces. Weaving, hand felting and hand dyeing are some of Laura’s favourite techniques.

Her body adornments and artefacts are known for their tactileness, an element that many audiences and workshops participants have found therapeutic and thought provoking.

Image showing Mounir Neddi standing in front of a white washed building looking at the camera with his arms crossed

Image showing Mounir Neddi standing in front of a white washed building looking at the camera with his arms crossed

Mounir Neddi

Mounir Neddi, 24 years old, from Bouznika city, is a high school history & geography teacher, and a PhD student in geography. Mounir is a member of the office of the National Association “Reading Network in Morocco” and President of the association’s branch in Mohammedia city. He is also responsible for the “Reading Wikipedia in the classroom in Morocco” project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as the Coordinator of the Reading Club at the faculty of Arts and Humanities in Mohammedia, and a student representative on the council of this faculty.

 

Image showing melissandre varin sitting at a table with their head held up towards the sun, a laptop sits on the table in the foreground

Image showing melissandre varin sitting at a table with their head held up towards the sun, a laptop sits on the table in the foreground

melissandre varin

Relation, displacement, multiplicity, identity, interdependency, and language emerge from melissandre’s work. Making from an Afro and Caribbean diasporic context, melissandre add layers of complexity using a situated Black feminism. Through performance arts, moving image assemblages, and site-specific installations - among other things - melissandre interrogate how the encounter between bodies that have been marginalised, everyday materials, and spaces transgresses normativity.

Commissioned nationally and internationally, melissandre co-parent 3 years old Eole. They currently work on B.O.O.K (Building Our Own Knowledge) a healing (library, art, rest) station, prepare transnational afrofeminist performances, are the curator of Open Call part of Studies in Theatre and Performance and are a Coventry Artspace Advisory Group member. melissandre also opperate in universities to raise inquieries during talks, workshops, and conferences.

Image showing Soufiane Hennani looking away from the camera with a hand on his chin.

Image showing Soufiane Hennani looking away from the camera with a hand on his chin.

Soufiane Hennani

Soufiane Hennani completed his PhD in Health Sciences at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy – Hassan II University of Casablanca. He is an independent activist for the rights of LGBTQI+ people and Queer Columnist.
He writes columns for the committed French magazine PDREVUE and has published several articles on the situation of LGBTQI+ people for the South African magazine QR PASSION, the blog of the independent Moroccan publishing house En Toutes Lettres, the Openchabab platform -of which he is a member- and other LGBTQI+ platforms.

Soufiane Hennani is the winner of the Arab Foundation For Freedom and Equality‘s social change program in 2019, has been a volunteer with the AIDS association since 2016 and co-founder of the Elille collective for the promotion of sexual diversity and gender plurality through art and culture.
Soufiane Hennani is also former vice-coordinator of the youth advisory committee at Amnesty International Morocco (2018-2019) and contributed in 2017-2019 to the realization of the platform INTERSECTIONS to denounce the liberticidal laws in the Moroccan penal code, produced by the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Soufiane Hennani is particularly interested in issues related to Queer Moroccan Identities and masculinities and as such he created in 2020 MACHI ROJOLA, an alternative platform to rethink and question masculinity(s) in Morocco.

About the hosts

Kenza Sefrioui

Kenza Sefrioui is a cultural journalist and literary critic and a founder of the Moroccan publishing house En Toutes Lettres. She is the author of La revue Souffles: 1966-1973, Espoirs de révolution culturelle au Maroc [Souffles (1966-1973), Hopes of a Cultural Revolution in Morocco] (éditions du Sirocco, 2013 winner of the Grand Atlas Prize). She undertook a study of the publishing sector and of reading for the 2014 general assembly on culture carried out by the association Racines for cultural development in Morocco and Africa (www.racines.ma), and published in 2017 Le Livre à l’épreuve, les failles de la chaîne au Maroc [Books under Threat: Voids in the Publishing Ecocsystem in Morocco] (éditions En Toutes Lettres). Kenza is the coordinator of Openchabab, a training program for young journalists and civil society actors, supporting humanist values and investigative journalism.

 

Lou Sarabadzic

Lou Sarabadzic is a French writer, artist and translator based in England. Her most recent work includes Augmented Memories/Mémoires augmentées, a bilingual ephemeral poetic experience using Augmented Reality, which investigated immersive storytelling in a digital world. Lou is also currently experimenting with visual art, papermaking and printmaking. For more information on past, current – and future – interests, please visit her website.

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