Katia Kameli
The Storyteller
Katia Kameli’s film The Storyteller explores the cultural role of deep-rooted artistic tradition in Morocco. Marrakech’s largest public square is well known for its al-halqa, a storyteller’s circle or circle of spectators. Abderrahim Al Azalia is a hlaïqya; it is his role to animate the al-halqa. He is the carrier of this ancestral Moroccan tradition and a special storyteller who interprets Bollywood films in his own unique way.
In Kameli’s film, Al Azalia intervenes in the Royal Theater of Marrakech, inside an unfinished opera house that appears like a concrete skeleton. For this performance, he interprets the plot of Satyen Bose’s 1964 film Dosti, a classic of the genre in black and white. The story comes full circle when Al Azalia shares with the crowd how Ramu and Mohan, the two protagonists of Dosti, escape their condition. As they play music, a circle forms around them.
In her film, Kameli realizes a merger of oral storytelling traditions in Morocco and the exuberance of Bollywood cinema. Her work creates an opportunity for cultures to intersect in ways that make space for new interpretations and critical discourse.
Katia Kameli is a visual artist and director whose practice is rooted in its research-focused approach. Adopting an anthropological lens, cultural and historical events form the basis for her imaginative projects. In this sense, the artist considers herself a translator. For Kameli, translation is not merely an exchange between two cultures or an act of transmission, it is an expansion of meaning and form. In Kameli’s films translation is used as a tool that has the capacity to undermine binaries and destabilize hierarchical structures, especially concerning notions of authorship and the tenuous relationship between original and copy. Often, revisioning or rewriting narratives is purposefully accentuated in Kameli’s work with the intention of calling attention to the ways in which global history is in fact much more impressionable and pliant than assumed. Her practice generates critical perspectives on world events, casting such events as mutable and reflexive.