The Art of Transmission: How Hiba Baddou Reimagines Moroccan Futurity

November 8, 2025Uncategorized

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1598551" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/Image-3.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A man wearing a white robe and headscarf rides a motorbike across a desert landscape, carrying a large stack of weathered satellite dishes on the back of the vehicle." width="970" height="647" data-caption='A character driving the paramobile from the Paramobile series. <span class="lazyload media-credit">Courtesy Hiba Baddou</span>’>A man wearing a white robe and headscarf rides a motorbike across a desert landscape, carrying a large stack of weathered satellite dishes on the back of the vehicle.

What was once a tool of reception becomes, in Moroccan artist Hiba Baddou’s hands, an archetype: a poetic link between sky and earth, between the collective memory of home and the restless pull of elsewhere. In 1980s Morocco, many households repurposed couscous pots as makeshift dishes to capture foreign channels at a time when certain broadcasts were still censored. “This gesture, both ingenious and subversive, opened an unexpected window onto the world,” Baddou tells Observer. “It deeply disrupted collective imagination, stirring both a desire to leave and, paradoxically, a renewed sense of attachment to the homeland.”

In “Paraboles – A Hertzian Odyssey” at MACAAL in Marrakech, she reimagines the satellite dish, a fixture of everyday life across Moroccan rooftops, as both a relic and a prophecy. Born from an essay Baddou began in 2021 on the influence of televised images on migratory identities, the project unfolds as a multidisciplinary odyssey, bringing together film, photography, installation, calligraphy, speculative fiction and even Hertzian language composed of 72 symbols derived from satellite frequencies. Together, they create a network of sensory and metaphorical stories orbiting a single question: How have the signals we receive shaped the way we see ourselves?

For Baddou, each medium is a distinct language, called forth by the story it must tell. The short film at the heart of “Paraboles” acts as a pulse, weaving together visual metaphors and soundscapes that evoke both nostalgia and transmission. Around it, the installations and artifacts become extensions of the film’s mythology: a “Republic of Hertz” passport made of goat leather that reacts to temperature, a Paramobile, which is a hybrid between a Peugeot 103 and a cart crowned with twenty-one dishes, evoking both mobility and longing.

A procession of people dressed in white robes and headscarves walk beside a large earthen pyramid-like structure in the desert, each wearing a satellite dish on their head like a headdress.A procession of people dressed in white robes and headscarves walk beside a large earthen pyramid-like structure in the desert, each wearing a satellite dish on their head like a headdress.

Photography anchors this cosmic narrative in the tangible. In black and white, it captures the sculptural geometry of Moroccan rooftops; in color, it drifts into dreamlike abstraction. “Each medium,” Baddou says, “becomes a prism through which a dimension of the project is reflected: documentary, sensory, symbolic, poetic. They all dialogue with each other to create a coherent yet multifaceted universe.”

Tensions of modernity and memory

Baddou’s fascination with the parabole comes from a personal and generational tension between modernity and tradition, exile and belonging. “An entire generation grows up between two worlds: on one side, the aspiration for a globalized modernity that promises freedom, mobility, and innovation,” she says. “On the other, a deep attachment to values, rituals, and landmarks passed down from previous generations. This duality creates powerful identity paradoxes.”

This ambivalence runs through “Paraboles.” The very object that connected Moroccan households to distant worlds also unsettled their sense of identity. Through this lens, Baddou sees globalization as both an erasure and an opportunity, a disruption that, when reframed, can generate new hybrid languages of being.

Sensory decolonization

“Paraboles” is experienced less as an exhibition than as an immersive landscape of memory and signal. Visitors move through layers of light, sound, and material, guided by objects that seem to hum invisible frequencies. Baddou’s intention is not to impose meaning but to provoke recognition—an awareness of how deeply our inner worlds have become mediated.

“I want people to feel how images shape desire,” she says. “Sometimes at the expense of our deeper realities. The exhibition questions the power of images—those that have often supplanted our own narratives, our own representations.”

A man and woman stand indoors against a dark wall, smiling and posing together; the man has his arm around the woman’s shoulder.A man and woman stand indoors against a dark wall, smiling and posing together; the man has his arm around the woman’s shoulder.

“Paraboles” is an attempt to decolonize that space, to restore the capacity to dream from within, not from imported images. For many who have seen the exhibition, this restoration is deeply personal. Visitors recall their own rooftop memories, family migrations, or the early fascination of tuning into foreign channels. One woman told Baddou that the show allowed her to “see her past with new eyes,” to recognize how screens once defined her sense of possibility.

Although her work often evokes the language of science fiction, Baddou’s futurism is spiritual, not technological. She draws on Sufism, Moroccan cosmology, and oral traditions to craft a future that grows from within cultural memory rather than outside it. “Sufism teaches us that time is not linear but revealed through states of consciousness,” she says. “The future is not elsewhere—it is a reactivation of the present’s unseen layers.”

Her invented Hertzian language embodies this principle: its symbols rearranged into new poetic combinations, forming an infinite dialogue between exile and rootedness.

Three people in white robes and headscarves stand and walk across the rooftop of a weathered urban building surrounded by several rusty satellite dishes under a cloudy blue sky.Three people in white robes and headscarves stand and walk across the rooftop of a weathered urban building surrounded by several rusty satellite dishes under a cloudy blue sky.

Rewriting Afrofuturism from the Maghreb

As Afrofuturism gains global recognition, Baddou and her contemporaries are expanding its geography. “Afrofuturism has often been told primarily from African American or Sub-Saharan perspectives,” she notes. “From North Africa, we bring other histories—Amazigh, Arab, Mediterranean—that also grappled with erasure and reactivation.”

For Baddou, the task is not imitation but reinvention—an African futurism grounded in Morocco’s plural cosmologies and vernacular aesthetics. “Our future,” she insists, “must be written through our own cosmologies, crafts, and mythologies, not through imported models of progress.”

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with MACAAL and the French Institute of Morocco, a partnership that Baddou sees not as a negotiation between power centers but as a dialogue between memory and futurity. “MACAAL roots the project on African soil,” she says, “while the French Institute opens a bridge to Western audiences. It’s not a hierarchy, it’s a reconciliation.”

If “Paraboles” could send a message through its own satellite, what would it broadcast? Baddou’s answer is deceptively simple: “It would tell us that the sky has always been our first screen, inviting us into the most beautiful story of all—the story of imagination.”

“Paraboles – A Hertzian Odyssey” is on view at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Marrakech through December 7, 2025.

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