At MACAAL in Marrakech, Moroccan artist Hiba Baddou transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, exploring how unseen waves shape memory, intimacy, and imagination
Installation view of ‘Paraboles, A Herzian Odyssey’ at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL). Photo: Ayoub El Bardii
In ‘Paraboles, A Hertzian Odyssey’, on view at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Marrakech, artist Hiba Baddou reimagines the invisible architectures of modern life. Through film, photography, calligraphy, and sculptural installation, she examines how digital frequencies intersect with spiritual and ancestral rhythms. In works such as Kesskass, a couscoussier reborn as an antenna, and The Sacralization of Images, a cinematic meditation on transmission and ritual, Baddou transforms everyday objects into conduits of connection. The exhibition invites viewers to slow down, listen, and feel the unseen forces that pass through us, carrying voices, images, and dreams across distances. Here, technology becomes a language of intimacy, and imagination a quiet form of resistance.
ART AFRICA: In ‘Paraboles, A Hertzian Odyssey’, you explore how digital flows have reshaped our spiritual and sensory connections to the world. How did this idea of invisible waves and “hertzian” communication first emerge in your practice, and what drew you to translate it into visual form?
Hiba Baddou: The idea of “hertzian” communication first appeared in my work when I started reflecting on how images and frequencies shape our inner lives. Growing up in Morocco, invisible waves were everywhere, carrying voices, songs, television programs, and dreams from distant places. They were intangible yet omnipresent, subtly influencing how we perceived the world and ourselves.
When I began researching the role of satellite imagery and digital transmissions in migration narratives, I realised these waves were more than technical phenomena: they were spiritual, almost mystical. They connected bodies and desires across geographies. Translating this into visual form meant giving shape to the invisible, making frequencies tangible through objects, materials, and light.
In that sense, Paraboles became a form of visual archaeology of the unseen: a way to render visible what constantly passes through us without our awareness, the waves that carry not only information but also longing, memory, and imagination.
Installation view of ‘Paraboles, A Herzian Odyssey’ at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL). Photo: Ayoub El Bardii
One of the exhibition’s most striking gestures is the transformation of a couscoussier into an antenna in Kesskass. Could you speak about this meeting point between domestic ritual and technological signal, and what it reveals about how culture evolves in the digital age?
The couscoussier embodies the essence of Moroccan domestic ritual: warmth, sharing, and continuity. Transforming it into an antenna is both a homage and a provocation. It’s about recognising how, in the digital age, the domestic and the technological constantly merge. The object that once carried steam and scent now carries waves and frequencies.
This transformation speaks of adaptability, of how cultures reinvent themselves when faced with new technologies. It is also an act of resistance: using a familiar, local object to hack global systems of communication. The gesture of turning a cooking tool into a transmitter evokes the creativity of Moroccan households in the 1980s, when people built their own satellite dishes to access censored channels.
Through Kesskass, I wanted to show that technological evolution doesn’t erase tradition; instead, it can be absorbed into it, hybridised, and made intimate. It’s a dialogue between the ancestral and the futuristic.
Installation view of ‘Paraboles, A Herzian Odyssey’ at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL). Photo: Ayoub El Bardii
The satellite dish recurs as a poetic and political motif in your work. How do you see this device functioning within the exhibition? Does it act more as a metaphor for transcendence, surveillance, or something more intimate and collective?
For me, the satellite dish carries all these dimensions simultaneously. It is both a tool of surveillance and of transcendence, a collective object that also speaks to solitude.
In Paraboles, the dish becomes almost anthropomorphic, an eye, an ear, a vessel. It listens to the sky, to distant frequencies, to unspoken stories. It is a poetic relic of our collective desire to connect with something beyond ourselves.
While in the West the satellite dish often evokes control or data, in Morocco it plays a more intimate role: it sits on rooftops like a guardian, silently linking families to worlds far away. It becomes a metaphor for collective imagination, for migration of thought and image.
So within the exhibition, the parabole is not just a technological object; it is a spiritual compass. It looks outward, but it also reflects inward, toward the hidden frequencies of memory and belonging.
Installation view of ‘Paraboles, A Herzian Odyssey’ at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL). Photo: Ayoub El Bardii
Paraboles is described as an invitation to “slow down, observe, and feel.” How did you shape the sensory rhythm of the exhibition through film, sound, or spatial arrangement to encourage this kind of attention from visitors?
The entire exhibition was conceived as a slowed-down frequency. The soundscape, composed of layered field recordings and Hertzian hums, invites visitors into a suspended temporality, between the real and the imagined.
The film unfolds like a breath: images appear and dissolve with the rhythm of wind, water, and signal interference. Visitors are invited not to consume but to listen. I wanted to create a state of porous attention, where contemplation replaces distraction.
In that sense, “slowing down” becomes a political act—a refusal of the acceleration imposed by digital culture—and a return to an embodied way of perceiving.
Installation view of ‘Paraboles, A Herzian Odyssey’ at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL). Photo: Ayoub El Bardii
Your work often blends a retro-futurist aesthetic with elements of Moroccan culture and language. How do you navigate that balance between looking back at heritage and imagining forward through technology and fiction?
For me, looking back and looking forward are not opposites; they are two directions of the same movement. The past contains the seeds of the future; the future gives new meaning to the past.
Moroccan culture is already full of futuristic intuitions: our oral myths, our architecture, and our cosmologies have always been speculative. I try to reactivate these ancestral technologies —rituals, symbols, materials — and project them into possible futures.
Retro-futurism allows me to blur temporal boundaries, to create a timeless space where a couscoussier re-becomes a satellite, and calligraphy becomes a code. It’s a way of saying that tradition is not static; it is a living archive capable of continuous transformation.
Technology and fiction become tools for reimaging heritage, not for erasing it. They allow us to dream futures that remain rooted, poetic, and plural.
Installation view of ‘Paraboles, A Herzian Odyssey’ at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL). Photo: Ayoub El Bardii
The exhibition is described as “a proposition of poetic resistance.” In an age of constant digital noise, how do you see imagination and art as forms of resistance or freedom?
In a world saturated with information, true resistance begins with silence, with the ability to listen, imagine, and feel beyond the algorithm.
Imagination is a radical act because it reclaims our inner space. It allows us to escape the prescribed narratives, to rebuild meaning on our own terms.
Art is a form of deceleration: a counter-signal to the acceleration of the digital world. It teaches us to inhabit ambiguity, to value slowness, to reconnect with the invisible.
Paraboles proposes that resistance doesn’t always have to be loud. It can be soft, intuitive, poetic. It can exist in the act of looking at the sky differently, of reclaiming wonder as a form of freedom.
‘Paraboles, A Hertzian Odyssey’ runs from September 12 to December 7, 2025, at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Marrakech, Morocco. For more information, visit www.macaal.org.
