What a time reception became a tool, Moroccan artists Error BaddouIts hand, an archetype: a poetic connection between sky and earth, between collective memories of home and the restless pull of elsewhere. In Morocco in the 1980s, many families reused couscous pots as makeshift dishes to capture foreign channels at a time when some broadcasts were still censored. “This gesture, both intelligent and subversive, has opened an unexpected window into the world,” Badu told the Observer. “It has profoundly disrupted the collective imagination, stirring both a desire to leave and, individually, a renewed sense of attachment to the homeland.”
In “Paraboles – A Hertzian Odyssey” at MACAAL in Marrakech, he reimagines the satellite dish, an element of daily life across Moroccan rooftops, as a relic and a prophecy. Baddou, born from an essay on the influence of televised images on immigrant identity in 2021, the project unfolds as a multidisciplinary odyssey, combining film, photography, installation, calligraphy, speculative fiction, and even a Hertzian language composed of 72 signs. Together, they create a network of emotional and metaphorical stories that revolve around a single question: How have the signals we receive shaped the way we see ourselves?
For Baddou, each medium is a distinct language, to be told through stories. The short film at the center of “Paraboles” acts as a pulse, combining visual metaphors and soundscapes that evoke both nostalgia and transmission. Around it, installations and artworks become extensions of the film’s mythology: a “Republic of Hertz” passport made of goatskin that reacts to temperature, a paramobile, a hybrid between a Peugeot 103 and a cart crowned with twenty-one dishes, both evoking mobility and longevity.
Photography anchors this cosmic narrative in reality. In black and white, it captures the sculptural geometry of Moroccan ceilings; In color, it drifts into dreamlike abstraction. “Each medium,” says Baddou, “becomes a prism through which a dimension of the project is reflected: documentary, emotional, symbolic, poetic. They all converse with each other to create a coherent yet multifaceted universe.”
The tension of modernity and memory
Badu’s fascination with the parabola comes from personal and generational tensions between modernity and tradition, exile and belonging. “An entire generation grows up between two worlds: on the one hand, the desire for a globalized modernity that promises freedom, mobility and innovation,” she says. “On the other hand, there is a deep attachment to values, rituals and landmarks from previous generations. This duality creates a strong identity paradox.”
This dichotomy runs through “paraboles”. The very thing that connected Moroccan families to the distant world also unsettled their sense of identity. Through this lens, Baddou sees globalization as both an erasure and an opportunity, a disruption that, when reconstituted, can create new hybrid languages of being.
Emotional decolonization
“Paraboles” is experienced less as an exhibition than an immersive landscape of memory and signification. Visitors move through layers of light, sound and material, guided by objects that hum invisible frequencies. Baddou’s purpose is not to impose meaning but to provoke recognition—an awareness of how deeply mediated our inner worlds are.
“I want people to feel how images shape desire,” she says. “Sometimes at the cost of our deeper reality. The exhibition questions the power of images – which have often replaced our own narratives, our own representations.”
“Paraboles” is an attempt to colonize that space, to reclaim the ability to dream from within, not from imported images. For many who have seen the exhibition, this recovery is deeply personal. Viewers recall memories of their own rooftops, family relocations or the first fascination of tuning into foreign channels. One woman told Baddoo that the show allowed her to “see her past with new eyes,” noting how screens once defined her sense of possibility.
Although her work often evokes the language of science fiction, Badu’s futurism is spiritual, not technological. He draws on Sufism, Moroccan cosmology, and oral tradition to create a future that grows out of cultural memory. “Sufism teaches us that time is not linear but unfolds through states of consciousness,” she says. “The future is not somewhere else – it is a reactivation of unseen layers of the present.”
His invented Hertzian language embodies this principle: its symbols rearrange into new poetic combinations, creating an infinite dialogue between exile and origin.
Rewriting Afrofuturism from the Maghreb
As Afrofuturism gained global recognition, Badu and his contemporaries were expanding its geography. “Afrofuturism has often been told primarily from an African American or sub-Saharan perspective,” she notes. “From North Africa, we bring other histories—Amazigh, Arab, Mediterranean—that involve erasure and reactivation.”
For Baddou, the work is not imitation but reinvention—an African futurism grounded in Morocco’s plural cosmology and regional aesthetics. “Our future,” he insists, “must be written through our own cosmology, craft and mythology, not through imported models of progress.”
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with MACAAL and the French Institute of Morocco, a partnership that sees Baddou not as a discussion between power centers but as a dialogue between memory and the future. “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 will tell us that the sky is always our first screen, inviting us to the most beautiful story – the story of imagination.”
“Parable – A Hertzian Odyssey“ On view at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maden (MACAAL) in Marrakech until December 7, 2025.
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