A project about the challenges of displacement as a third-generation migrant by lens-based artist MAryam Touzani. Navigating her Dutch and Moroccan Amazigh heritage, Touzani examines the spaces where cultures overlap, conflict, and fracture, uncovering hidden narratives of belonging and erasure. Her practice uses photography and archival material to question how histories are preserved or silenced, while creating new visual languages that embrace absence, resilience, and survival. Her series, “Maktub” started from a sense of frustration as well as a consideration of the Arabic word الغربة (pronounced Al-Ghorba) that can be translated as being “away from home.” Moroccan immigrants often use it to express feelings of estrangement mixed with nostalgia:
“I grew up listening to stories of departures and people leaving home searching for a better future. Moroccans in Europe bear a double burden. They have suffered racism, bigotry, and Islamophobia since childhood. And still: we try to juggle between finding a place of belonging in our birth countries without discarding our heritage….By questioning myself and my experiences on my own terms, I hope to move away from simplistic narratives and instead depict the complexities and nuances of migrant identities. Through symbols, text, and image collages, a poetic approach emerges to entangle these issues. My aim with the project is not to tell that this is the diasporic identity or to provide a linear story. But to take the viewer on a journey without clear answers but instead ambiguous questions.”
MAryam Touzani participated in our 2025 Booooooom Art & Photo Book Award and made our shortlist.
