Hamza Halloubi in conversation with Natasha Hoare
I first came across the work of Hamza Halloubi whilst assisting on the Marrakech Biennale. We showed his work To Leave (2011), a highly charged piece in the context of Morocco when we exhibited it in 2014, and which has become even more loaded in light of the escalation of the migrant crisis that has pushed so many people up through Morocco in an attempt to reach Europe. History overtakes artworks. It engulfs them and transforms their interpretation, in spite of their resistance or supposed detachment. This is exemplified in Hamza’s film Nature Morte (2013), which I showed at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam in 2016. This deceptively simple film shows turning pages of a book, which show painter Giorgio Morandi’s still lives of bottles and other objects in parallel to various historical cesura (the atomic bomb, the bombardment of Guernica) and the avant-garde art movements that directly addressed these moments. The film, and others from his oeuvre, seems to ask how art sits with history? How can a shift in camera angle, a turn of the page, the gesture of a hand, alter meaning, and what is this meaning in the service of? Is there a way to purge the camera of cliche and preconception? These questions, and the overwhelming assault of history, has been vividly reinforced in the past week of tying up this interview - which has taken place over a long time span via email exchange - with Israel's new war on Gaza. Hamza’s work becomes ever more forceful in its interrogation of how images function. How perspective can radically shift with the addition or subtraction of new pieces of visual information or of voice over.

Hamza, I really respond to your work in so many ways. The first piece I saw was To Leave, 2011. It is such a simple but devastating piece. Full of pathos, through the slightest of means. Can you tell me about this piece, how and why it was made, and what it means to you now?
To Leave was made in 2011, the year of the Arab Spring uprisings. It represented my brother who was still a teenager. I can't help but watch the video thinking about the political and social events of this period. Of the breath of fresh air on the horizon, and the hard despair that followed the failure of the movements. To Leave also makes me think of my personal and intellectual relationship with the attitude of thought while moving, coming and going. We agree to stay in the movement. It's a video that works very well shown as a loop. It's a continuous round trip from south to north, an urgent and sacred useful journey, it's an open circle towards the possible.
This idea of movement is an interesting one. Resisting being fixed, static, part of one value system, or body of knowledge. You repeatedly visit literature in your work, and literary figures, such as Genet. I am thinking of the work in which you visit his grave in Larache, Morocco. Do you see Genet as occupying an indeterminate position between cultures, geographies, disciplines? I wonder also about accessing these figures beyond their deaths, as a gesture towards the indeterminacy of time; a figure reaching beyond the time of their living. 
My intention in making This video, on Genet's tomb in Larache, is to question "the places of culture".  The importance in the history and culture of the places from which we speak.Because I think there is a hierarchy of places. There are places that deserve more attention than others. This is why I start speaking in my work from "minor places".I'm interested in minor, forgotten events that weren't covered because they aren't representative of major currents.I see this grave of Genet, like a monument of the failed revolutions of the 20th century, the black panthers, the Palestinian liberation movements...Literary figures in some of my works serve as references to address broader issues.
You mention in the film that taking out your camera, sometimes 'feels like a barbaric act'. Can you expand on what you mean by this? 
In my work I often wonder about the reason for producing work: "It has been a few months since I did anything, since I have wanted to do anything, there is nothing to do." or I'm not really sure if it's worth doing. That's where the phrase comes from: "Sometimes I think that taking out the camera is a barbaric act." All my work is driven by feelings of shame. These are complex impressions: it is the shame of speaking in the place of those who did not know how to speak. the shame of having the luxury of being able to make art. Taking images for me is not a trivial act, taking an image is taking a position, stripping oneself naked, being in a position of both strength and weakness. The images are not there as commodities to be consumed with ease, they are wrapped in folds and must be unfolded and deciphered for these images to surface. Most of my videos are very short, like lightning bolts. These are sick images that need words not to support them but on the contrary to let them flow. These are images that stutter, which demonstrate what they are made of at the very moment of their appearance.
This reminds me of Benjamin's ‘angel of history’, picking up fragments of the past. It also has a strong decolonial aspect, pitching the North African story against the dominant narrative of western history. How far have you found an audience in Belgium for this work, is it a receptive context for counter history?
We reduce non-Western artists to people who lack freedom, who seek refuge to express themselves. Fleeing dictatorships to land in the West, which welcomes them with open arms.  Or this politically correct attitude of electing artists by contribution to their identities...as if our problem is to be present in the image, in the scene...when we begin to radically question the canons, heritage and social class... We are not "relevant", we do not even have the right to be dismissed or imprisoned as in authoritarian regimes. We are just ignored. It is the worst that can happen to an intellectual or an artist. You are free to do what you want but you will not get the attention your work deserves.We tend to believe that art is global, that it has no borders, that we can enjoy and engage with artists beyond their identities, but this is completely false, artists are still represent as national heroes, they embody a given culture, and we appreciate this or that artist by contribution to the cultural values they share with the public.Exiled and emigrated artists have always had special status in the history of art.In my work I question these balances of power.  I "write back" to western modernist narratives in the tradition of Fanon, Saïd, González-Torres...I do not seek to be in the image or to represent my community.  I'm not trying to be the lucky elected one.
I think that's a really interesting idea, to be writing back. I think it undermines the mythic status of western ideas such as 'freedom'. That it is textual, or even fictional, a unifying force that conceals huge discrepancies in the distribution of wealth and opportunity across the West. Your work engages with texts, but it is of course using the visual medium of the camera, the lens, which has its own history in Morocco, as an anthropological and ethnographic tool of dominion and control, but one that was taken up by Moroccan film makers like Ahmed Bouanani, who reversed that gaze, and created such wonderful films. Where do you place your relationship to film? Having moved from moving image art works, to making a feature film yourself.
The feature film I'm making is a unique experience that I conducted in the same way as other projects. It means total independence and freedom.I'm more interested in video than cinema. In video work I undertake to do something other than cinema. I think most of what you see in museums and galleries are cinematographic proposals. The question is not just a form that has no place in cinemas (by its duration and its content) and that it has the merit of being projected to the art public (more sensitive and cultivated!) but it is a more complex relationship that I seek to question.In most of my video installations, I challenge the spectator who is not only a number or an abstraction (like in the cinema, by the way) but it is a specific identity with a name, a sex, a class … It is when this person with a specific identity enters the space of the exhibition, that the video comes alive and activates. In front of my work the spectator does not have this luxury and this comfort to see without being seen. We are addressed personally, we are a visible body questioned in the public space and not a paid ticket, erased in a dark room of dreams and nightmares.In my exhibitions, I try to create a confrontation with the viewer. Against this bourgeois idea of the exhibition, where the works are there to receive us and where the spectator walks around tasting while passing from one room to another. In my exhibitions there is a kind of blocking wall (eyes that look at you and the word that speaks to you) you have to cross it or clear it. Yes, I agree that your work demonstrates a fundamental interest in perception; the way we we see things as informed by our own biases, experiences, and memories vs the reality of them. Perhaps this is where some of the confrontational energy you've mentioned comes in also? A rug pull of sorts takes place for the viewer in many of your feels, where the image is finally altered, or removed totally? 
Exactly, in fact the misfortune (and perhaps the fortune) of the third world artist today is that they live in exile and show their work to the Western viewer, who has pre-established ideas about images which come from elsewhere. How to shake up these expectations but also how not to worry about it and not to consider it in the matter? We give a lot of importance to the white, bourgeois, male Western viewer... I don't know why I have to correct these prejudices and his clichés. I think it's a monumental mistake that we spend our time and energy correcting clichés, instead of dealing with the many problems that concern us.
In your questioning of the camera, and foregrounding of the constructedness of the image, do you have a feeling about the ethics of the artist? What role does the artist play in the making of images that tell particular stories?
I don’t think ethics has an important role in image construction/deconstruction, this process follows scientific methods. In my opinion, it is the opposite of the political correctness that reigns today and the pretence of defending something. (I don't know if I understood the question correctly.) but I think that the artist sometimes participates in nourishing particular narratives. This is why we always make the mistake of talking about artists as being a family that shares specific values. Recently I leafed through an art magazine which brings together contemporary artist manifestos: I had the impression of reading an American foreign affairs manifesto. The same questions, the same issues...many artists and intellectuals who come from the global south come from the bourgeoisie. Most known in the West ignore their privileges and the relationships that their families have maintained with authoritarian regimes and the colonial and post-colonial elite. This is a very interesting topic to study. I am thinking of Fanon's critique of what he calls "the National bourgeoisie" and which he considers to be an extension of the colonial authoritarian apparatus.
Are there any histories of video that you look to in your work? It feels like there is an engagement with avant garde filmmaking. Chris Marker, for instance? My images need speech, which does not work like the narration of avant-garde cinema. But it is a word that does not tell, it protests and manifests itself not to support the images, but rather to weaken them by indicating their faults and their weaknesses. This is why I don't feel like I belong to avant garde film like that of Chris Marker, because they were more concerned with the “pure image”, “the truth image”, the relationships between documentary and fiction, sound and image.