14/07/2026
I am pleased to announce my participation in the upcoming Bank Al-Maghrib Exhibition at Dar El Cadi, Rabat, Morocco.
Symphony (II)
2026
Created from discarded telephone handsets and an accordion, Symphony (II) explores language as a living material: unstable, elastic, and continually reshaped by the structures of power through which it circulates. The accordion's bellows become a metaphor for language that expands, contracts, bends, and recomposes itself. As narratives circulate, they accumulate omissions, translations, censorship, and reinterpretations. No discourse is ever fixed; each bears the traces of its own displacement.
Suspended above the instrument, the telephone receivers form a fragile architecture of absent voices. Once designed to overcome distance, these objects no longer transmit anything. Disconnected from their original function, they become the vestiges of an obsolete technology and the material fossils of invisible communications. The work shifts our attention from messages to the infrastructures that make them possible, revealing that every act of speech depends on technical, political, and social networks that shape both its circulation and its disappearance.
Conceived in collaboration with my father, architect Azzedine Baddou, Symphony (II) extends an intergenerational reflection on reuse and the transformation of materials. Growing up surrounded by salvaged objects, I learned that what was considered waste could acquire new meaning and memory. Here, the gesture goes beyond reuse: it transforms the object from a tool into a sign. The telephones become the organs of a collective language shaped by history, technology, and memory. Like the accordion breathing to produce sound, the installation appears to inhale and exhale the narratives that shape our societies.
The series will premiere at the Bank Al-Maghrib Museum from 17 July 2026, accompanied by a short film.
