Bab Sebta (Ceuta’s Gate)

2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

19min

Randa Maroufi

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Randa Maroufi’s Bab Sebta , is named after a Spanish enclave in Morocco, Ceuta. The film is a portrait of the ‘doorway to Europe’, a place where a murky economy of semi legal exchanges take place across a border anomaly. The border is represented by painted lines across the tarmac, as innocent as playground markings but with far greater consequences. It is across these surfaces that Maroufi choreographs a slow ritualistic ballet of gestures and rituals, shot from above, observing the processes that take place across state lines. The camera pans across the infinite lines of people waiting with bundles and parcels containing food, appliances clothes and various other goods, all of which will pass through checkpoints, in a back and forth between smugglers and border control officers. All the while a rhythmic voiceover recounts the trials and tribulations of border police and traffickers alike, telling tall tales as bodies and goods traverse the fine line between legality and criminality.

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Randa Maroufi works with video, photography, installation and performance, growing up among a society dominated by images, she is as critical and as skeptical of them as she is attracted to them. Questions of reliability and validity are central to her work, as she treads the line between documentary and fiction, as a means of developing a critique of contemporary issues of gender through the lens of the occupation of public space. Her work plays on tropes and fixed scenarios, inverting them to subverting them: women cat calling, women occupying a whole café, domestic tasks given white collar credentials.

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Colors:

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• margin.n.01
• frontier.n.02
• mapmaking.n.01
• trade.n.01
• exchange.n.03
• position.n.01