Maqam.tv’s research cycles are programs sketching out lines of enquiry to be answered through different expression and transmission practices. They are stages for video screenings to which are often added audio, visual, performative or text-based acts. And their aim is to unpack the stakes of one central theme in a deep, free and experimental way.

The cycles are spaces in which stable and incarcerated research frameworks can be disavowed by way of commoning; co-creating, co-teaching and co-organizing, all through ever-changing bodies and formulas. They are unanchored, transmigratory even: they pass from a state to another, from a body to another, from a place to another; and they’re certainly not on a rush. They take their time, stretch over months, sometimes do not have a determined ending, and sometimes again overlap. A cycle develops a little like a jazz chorus actually, with preliminaries, or series of improvised, free, segments after each melodic part that elevate the register little by little, until reaching its climax.



Le corps par dessus l’image is a research cycle exploring ways of taking up space with one’s body before and behind; around and against; ahead and after; afar and over the moving image. It’s interested in having the image speak in tongues it doesn’t know of and in playing light of common spectatorship and viewing experiences. The cycle takes cue of figures of narrators, griots, story-tellers, hype men, masters-of-ceremonies and other mediators and has until now taken the forms of pedagogical workshops, written pieces, mise-en-scènes, performances, and book making ateliers.

Selected archive

marginalized films seem to be a thing only when at least three decades old, text, voice recording and film screenings
Bâtard Festival at Beursschouwburg · November 2024, Brussels, Belgium

Screening of Cyanosis by Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami (Iran, 2007, 30')
Untitled Life Experience by Grocco a.k.a. Trick54 (Morocco, 2022, 17’)
Si Mohamed by Salim Bayzou (Morocco, 2016, 25')

All three film works stand at the extremities of the image making machine through, inter alia, their formats, their narrations, their subjects and their objects. They were preceded with an audio intervention that drew on the ways by which filmmakers of the Global South must sanitize, smoothen, filter, regulate, revise, rectify their languages to meet Western (now turned universal) standards of film development, production and dissemination.

architecture through/by/despite/against occupation, workshop and acted-on film screenings
Siniya Research · July 2024, Casablanca, Morocco

Screening of The Architecture of Violence by Ana Naomi de Sousa (2014, 25')
Refugee Heritage by Sandra Hilal and Alessandro Petti from DAAR, Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (2022, 9’)
The Dis/Appeared: 25 Notes on Colonial Regimes of Perception by Ian Alan Paul (2018, 33')
Overview of RIWAQ Centre for Architectural Conservation (2013, 16')

various stages of unheard, written piece published in Mizna: The Cinema Issue, guest-edited by Saeed Taji Farouky
Link to read it online · July 2024

ma fawqa al-sura, an initiation to mediating films, residency and workshop at Qisas program for image education
Cinémathèque de Tanger · October 2023, Tangier, Morocco

ma fawqa al-sura is a workshop about mediating films as to translate, elevate, unscreen, shuffle around or upset their appartus. The workshop culminated in a one-hour mise-en-scène where participants played in and out their selection of four short films, revised scenarios, enacted film protagonists and film crews and just generally had a lot of fun.

various stages of unheard, lecture-performance with a screening of La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua by Assia Djebar (1977)
Tashweesh Festival with Beursschouwburg · October 2022, Brussels, Belgium

various stages of unheard is a lecture-performance expanding on the context of production and reception of La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua and reviewing ways by which the instrumentalization of women’s bodies took place in the region and beyond. The piece was written in honor of Jina Mahsa Amini, murdered in September 2022 by the religious morality police of Iran's government.

The set-up is as follows: The stage is that of a film theater and I am sitting at a desk in front of a computer, facing the audience. The computer’s screen is split into two halves: the left half contains the text I am reading to an audience; and the right contains the desktop version of Instagram, from which I’ll be soon regularly playing short clips. The screen behind me (the same screen onto which the film will be later projected) shows the entirety of my computer screen.

please fill in the empty stage, performance and video
KASK School of Arts · July 2019, Ghent, Belgium and Mahal Art Space · October 2020, Tangier, Morocco

please fill in the empty space is the piece by which Maqam.tv was born.

More soon.

Since 2022, Maqam.tv has been collaborating with Marrakesh based Harvest Festival initiated by Global Diversity Foundation, an NGO engaged with the conservation of biological and cultural diversity through community-based action research, capacity-strengthening and partnership-building in Morocco. Maqam.tv has hosted screenings in varying places of the city that place at their center matters of ecology, community development and conservation of beings, meaning and gestures.

…علَى هَذِهِ الأَرْض مَا يَسْتَحِقُّ الحَياةْ, film screenings
Harvest Festival at DADA art space · May 2024, Marrakesh, Morocco

Screening of The Batalla Trilogy: Batalla (2017, 4'35), Fracking (2018, 3'), Tear Gas (2019, 1'35) by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Mexico)
Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams by Karrabing Film Collective (Australia, 2016, 29')
Landscape Series #1 by Nguyen Trinh Thi (Vietnam, 2013, 5')
Yom al-Ard by Monica Maurer (Palestine, 2019, 15')

A film compilation showing bodies that at all times have bore witness, that are wealthy of their inheritances, carriers of multitudes, travelers of the earth —still and always pushing their ways towards visibility, defying linearities, interrupting imperialist and settler modes of governance. These six films, from Palestine, Mexico, Vietnam and Australia’s Northern Territory are held together by gestures of resistance and survivance; let us learn from them.

…علَى هَذِهِ الأَرْض مَا يَسْتَحِقُّ الحَياةْ, film screenings
Harvest Festival at Noujoum Jamaâ El Fna · June 2024, Marrakesh, Morocco

Screening of The Untold Revolution: Food Sovereignty in Palestine by Ameen Nayfeh (Palestine, 2021, 26')
The Seed Queen of Palestine by Mariam Shahin (Palestine, 2018, 25')

Harvest Festival closing event, film screening
Harvest Festival at Villa Majorelle · October 2022, Marrakesh, Morocco

Screening of Jaffa, the Orange's Clockwork by Eyal Sivan (Palestine, 2009, 88')

A journey from the abundant harbor town of Jaffa to the notorious Jaffa orange, a fruit that became the symbol for Israeli success and Palestinian loss after having been the other symbol of unity between Jews and Arabs. Through a rich ensemble of both Palestinian and Israeli voices and rarely accessed collections of film, photo and music archives set against lush lands and vast orchards, Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan draws the witty, intelligent and generous portrait of the famous citrus fruit.

Khial Nkhel's Garage opening event, film screenings
Harvest Festival x Khial Nkhel at Garage · May 2022, Marrakesh, Morocco

Screening of Rawya by Atteyyat Abnoudy (Egypt, 1995, 16')
Gabbeh by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Iran, 1996, 72')

More soon.

( film ) music ))) is a cycle exploring music on film; music in film; film on music; film in music; music film and other variations of the two. Taking place every month or so at smagh, in Casablanca, Morocco.

More soon.