Writing Back2019-2021Dimensions variable with installation, Single channel video projection, 7:22 min, color, sound

Writing Back (2019–2021) is an attempt to portray Cherifa, a charismatic Moroccan woman who lived in Tangier during the 1960s. She is only known through the writings of Jane and Paul Bowles, as well as William S. Burroughs, who depicted her as an evil oriental woman.Halloubi, who comes from the same city where Cherifa once lived, seeks—through these Western representations of her and by reading between the lines of that literature—not to correct her image, but rather to analyze Cherifa’s own strategy: to protect herself from the "orientalist gaze", she participates in its construction by saturating it with even more clichés — thereby stripping it of all credibility.Halloubi employs the strategy of shadow and silence as a tool of resistance against this objectification.