Video by Gilles Aubry and Zouheir Atbane (27:01) for the “Why ain’t you rich if you’re so smart” group exhibition at Marrakech Biennale 2014.

In 1959, author Paul Bowles visited the Moroccan village of Tafraoute to record traditional Ahwash music. In 2010, Aubry and Atbane returned to that same village to start a series of listening sessions. The film documents these moments—the conversations, the memories, and the new music created when the locals heard their own heritage played back to them. Through this process, the work examines the micropolitics of invisibility: Bowles as the “invisible spectator”; the veil as a strategy of resistance during the French occupation; and the Pythagorean curtain of French acousmatic music.

Installation views at the Swiss Art Award Exhibition, Basel, 2015