Moroccan multidisciplinary artist, Rim Battal’s video diptych, ‘Bonne Maman’ depicts the picking of flowers, their subsequent display in a Bonne maman jam jar and once dry and faded, their eventual return to the earth from which they grew. The subject of Battal’s work is the denunciation of the role of colonisation in the break of transmission between colonised people and the generations that follow.

 

‘Bonne Maman I’ points to the paternalism of the coloniser (the notion of a protector- the Bonne maman jam jar aims/claims to keep the flowers alive), and the fascination he has with the exoticism of the colonised (flowers decorate/ adorn a table and can be seen as a trophy-like). An aesthetic is constructed which results in fictionalised representations based on the fantasy of the colonised.

 

‘Bonne maman II’ underlines the failure of the coloniser to appropriate, to assimilate the colonised, and to force transformation/ conformation, serving to highlight the complexity of Arabness as a post-colonial concept given its poly-linguistic, multi-cultural properties, and Semitic roots, as well as its inclusion of a plurality of religious beliefs.