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 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.

More soon.