Ils nous demandent d'être des mères comme si on ne travaillait pas et de travailler comme si on n'avait pas d'enfants
Fatima Bianchi in conversation with Salima S. El Mandjra
05.03.2024, h 18.30
Le Cube, Rabat (Marocco)
The spaces of Le Cube, in Rabat, host “Ils nous demandent d'être des mères comme si on ne travaillait pas et de travailler comme si on n'avait pas d'enfants,” a conversation between Fatima Bianchi, artist, and Salima S. El Mandjra, architect, writer, and artist.
The starting point is the screening of “Les Dissidentes,” a project by Fatima Bianchi produced by Careof and La Société du Sensible, realized with the support of Italian Council (11th Edition, 2022): a film that sheds light on issues related to the maternal role, often made taboo by contemporary society, where women are constantly under pressure.
Le Cube, project partner, hosts a reflection and an in-depth discussion on the feminine and the maternal, an analysis that starts from the fictional construction of the filmic work created by the artist to reach the present day.
Fatima Bianchi
Fatima Bianchi is an Italian director. Her research is located between creative documentary and experimental cinema, with a transversal approach.
Through cinema, she explores family ties, personal memory, the female condition, and motherhood. Inspired by everyday life events, the repetition of gestures, and micro-stories, she is interested in the experience of the individual as a unique phenomenon that grows within a community and, in turn, makes it grow.
Her films are rooted in the autobiographical sphere, with the ability to address the social context in which the intimate becomes political expression. With a sensitive gaze, she creates new narratives based on different registers and forms of temporality. She places great importance on form, giving sound the same level as image.
Alongside her work as a director, she supports numerous projects as an editor. She considers editing an important moment in artistic creation, conceiving it as a form of writing, where editing itself becomes staging, reorganizing the world to see it better, but also to modify it through psychological or memorial associations.
She lives and works in Marseille.
Graduated from Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, her films and installations have been shown in numerous festivals and galleries, including Visions du Réel (Switzerland), Cinéma Vérité Tehran (Iran), Open City Documentary (United Kingdom), Kinopanorama Roma (Italy), ZagrebDox (Croatia), Filmmaker Festival (Italy), Mediterranea 18 Young Artists Biennale (Tirana), Centro d'Arte Contemporanea di Briançon (France), Les Instants Vidéo (France), Fondazione Merz in Torino (Italy). With her film Notturno, she was selected at the Settimana Internazionale della Critica of the 73rd Venice Biennale. Among the awards and mentions received: First Prize at Filmmaker Festival with her film Tyndall, First Prize Fondazione Libero Bizzarri, ArteVisione 2020, Italian Council 2022. She has worked as editor, among others, on Aswang by Alyx Arumpac (Best Editing Famas Digital Philippine 2020).
Salima S. El Mandjra
Salima S. El Mandjra is an architect, writer, and artist. She currently teaches at the Scuola Nazionale di Architettura in Rabat. The dimension related to interactions between humans and the environment, both at the socio-cultural and physical and sensory levels, as well as the creative processes that derive graphically from them, are at the center of her research.
Italian Council
Fatima Bianchi’s project was realized thanks to the support of Italian Council (11th edition, 2022), a program for the support and international promotion of Italian contemporary art by the Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea (DGCC) of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
The project is promoted by Careof in collaboration with Le Cube (Rabat, Morocco), with the cultural partnership of Films Femmes Méditerranée (Marseille), Ramdom (Lecce), Zeit (Cagliari).
The work "Les dissidentes," produced by Careof and La Société du Sensible, will enter the collections of MART - Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (Italy).