DE / LIMITED: Three studies of borders and identity with Randa Maroufi

DE / LIMITED takes as its starting point the limits and boundaries that inform Randa Maroufi’s work. On 14 October, Öresund Comparative Borderlands Resarch Group will host a screening of three of her short films and discussion with the artist herself, featuring insights from anthropologist Mahmoud Keshavarz and transmedia scholar Erin Cory.

A cross-dressing domestic servant vanishes without a trace in Casablanca; young Moroccan men, posing in an abandoned amusement park to fabricate images of strength and wealth for social media, attract the attention of the national security services; a crowd of women wrap their bodies in cheap commercial goods while waiting to cross the Spanish frontier from Ceuta into Morocco. These protagonists embody the social commentaries behind Randa Maroufi’s award-winning visual oeuvre. With her camera, she brings together the ambiguities of witness testimony with a carefully staged re-enactment of collective memory. By exploring the boundaries that connect and divide people, and shape our movement across time and place, Randa Maroufi invites us to question widely held assumptions about gender and social class, power, and the police, both in Moroccan society and across wider Europe today.

Bios

Randa Maroufi

Randa Maroufi is a visual artist from Casablanca, now based in Paris. Her work engages with the politics and staging of bodies in public and private spaces, the status of the image, and the limits of representation. Her cinematic work brings together several artistic disciplines, including performance art, installation, and photography for sound and video.

A graduate of the French National Studio of Contemporary Art (Le Fresnoy) and Morocco's oldest Institute of Fine Arts (l'École des Beaux-Arts de Tétouan), Randa Maroufi's approach to art and filmmaking resonates at the intersection of critical border studies, gender studies, and postcolonial theory.

Her film The Great Safae has been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and she has exhibited at, among other places, the Biennale de Lyon (2022); Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2021); New Museum, New York (2020); MA Museum of Quebec (2019); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2016); and the Marrakech Biennale (2014).

Erin Cory

Erin Cory is a Senior Lecturer at Malmö University where she directs the MA program in Media & Communication Studies and the Medea Lab. Bridging the arts and activist media practice, her research embraces a transmedia storytelling approach to study ordinary, embodied experiences of bordering in the US Mexico, Denmark, Sweden, Lebanon and Uganda. Her research has been supported by, among others, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and the Swedish Institute. 

Mahmoud Keshavarz

Mahmoud Keshavarz is an Associate senior lecturer in Anthropology at Uppsala University and is a co-founder of the Decolonizing Design collective and the Critical Border Studies network. Bringing together insights from across anthropology, design studies and border studies, His work illuminates the technical, material and aesthetic practices that underpin international borders and migration within the wider legacies of racial and colonial domination. Mahmoud is currently working on his second monograph, a book of essays about the design, politics and anthropology of border situations.

You purchase tickets through The Danish Film Institute.

The event is organised by Öresund Comparative Borderlands Resarch Group, funded by Center for Modern European Studies.