La photo-broderie de Carolle Bénitah : commémoration, transgression et réinvention de soi

Abstract:Dans « L'enfance marocaine » (2009), Carolle Bénitah trie, scanne, recadre et redimensionne des photographies de famille en noir et blanc de son enfance au Maroc dans les années 1960 et 1970. Ce faisant, Bénitah crée des œuvres d'art et, en même temps, met en évidence la manière dont les photographies de famille peuvent fonctionner comme des objets de témoignage qui ont la capacité de saisir les changements traumatisants qui façonnent les époques et les mentalités postmodernes et postcoloniales. Les photo-broderies de Bénitah racontent des histoires familiales, personnelles et de communauté, à l'intersection entre histoires et mémoires publiques et privées. Inséparables de l'histoire de la communauté juive marocaine au XXè siècle, les images de Bénitah témoignent des transformations dramatiques que cette communauté a subi et commémorent des espaces.Abstract:In "L'enfance marocaine" (2009), Carolle Bénitah, after scanning and reframing family photographs from her childhood in Morocco in the 1960s and 1970s, embroiders over the black and white images using red and black threads. As she transforms family portraits into works of art, Bénitah highlights how family photographs can function as testimonial objects that have the ability to capture the traumatic shifts that shape postmodern and postcolonial eras and mentalities. Her photo-embroideries tell community, family, and personal stories at the intersection between public and private history and memory. Inseparable from the history of the Moroccan Jewish community in the twentieth century, Bénitah's images bear witness to the dramatic transformations it experienced and memorialize sociocultural spaces that no longer exist. Bénitah also uses embroidery to transform family photographs into a fragmentary autobiographical narrative that is also a site of contestation and self-invention. The artist celebrates family links while exposing the violence behind the patriarchal socialization of women that family photography validates and perpetuates. Through her hybrid images, Bénitah individualizes, revises, and feminizes the past that conventional family albums preserve.