Fantasias – Fierté nationale

“A place where the image no longer merely travels, but is reconfigured, questioned, reclaimed.”

This work draws on colonial postcards of Morocco from the French protectorate period, historically used to circulate a folklorized and hierarchical imaginary. These images, often presented as picturesque scenes or “native types,” served to hold reality at a distance, freezing bodies and practices within an exoticizing vision.

The support, cut in the shape of a giant postage stamp, refers to the controlled circulation of these images, their mass distribution and their role in constructing a colonial gaze. Here the stamp becomes a space of reversal: a place where the image no longer merely travels, but is reconfigured, questioned and reclaimed.

On this surface, a set of transferred postcards forms a fragmented background, against which a hand-painted tbourida rider stands out. This painterly gesture reintroduces the body, movement and pride into an archive that had neutralized them. The horse — a central figure of the Moroccan imaginary and a symbol historically targeted by the colonial enterprise — becomes an act of visual resistance.

The work does not seek to correct the archive, but to reveal its tensions, silences and ideological layers. By superimposing transfer, cutting and painting, it offers a situated and sensitive reading of history, in which creation becomes a means to reactivate memory, shift the gaze and bring forth a counter-narrative from an imposed heritage.