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While Sara Benabdallah’s obsession with the surreal and fantastic was always brewing inside her, which she attributes to growing up in the heart of Marrakesh, her obsession with the latter would not take full form until she moved back to her home country in the US 2021.
In an alternate reality, Benabdallah would have stayed in the Midwest after studying film for 10 years, and continued making films inspired by cowboys and Westerns. But, Morocco beckoned, and she would soon find herself rediscovering the culture she grew up in, this time with more curiosity, and more intention.
“It started to get really difficult and I felt very lost. I made a lot of movies, but I didn’t necessarily like anything I made. I didn’t realise it back then, but it felt like I was competing to channel American voices. I also didn’t have my own voice. Something felt wrong, so after finishing my graduate degree around three years ago I decided to come home, and it was the easiest decision I’ve ever made in my life. I got a lot from my experience there, but my roots are not there,” she reflects.
It only made sense that she reconnected with her roots in the same place that fuelled her love for the arts: the heart of Medina. As a child of the 1990, Benabdallah grew up among artists and craftsmen, by virtue of her parents working in the tourism industry restoring riads, and garden courtyards which are architectural staples of the city. Upon restoring them, they would rent them out to visiting tourists from all over the world – the people who would end up sparking her interest in what lay beyond the construction sites she lived on. The boundaries between her home and the guest houses were blurred, as she vividly recalls doing her French homework with the French visitors in the nearby riad, and learning how to use a camera for the first time through a family friend.
Morocco was always a place of magic for Benabdallah. After all, she does recognise how atypical her childhood was compared to the other kids around her at the time. When they were out playing in the streets of the city, she was tucked away in a tapestry of merging cultures. That is not to say that her home country was not in the back of her mind while she was away, as her upbringing stayed with her in ways she would only realise thousands of kilometres and an Atlantic Ocean away. The reckoning finally came when it was time to work on her graduate thesis.
“It was the first time I actually worked on a film that was rooted in Moroccan culture. My thesis was about this story my father told me as a kid. He comes from the outskirts of Marrakesh where he grew up in a small village. There wasn’t much to do back then, in the sixties, so his grandpa would always tell him, ‘Oh son, come with me. We’re going to go listen to the metal.’ And in my head, I was like ‘What do you mean metal?’ Turns out, that metal was the sound of the one car that would pass by every couple of hours, the echo it made as it drove across the open empty desert,” she explains. “And that was all the entertainment they had.”
The magic, for her, is in the language; in the allegories her grandmother told and retold her of talking animals and fantastic beasts, only to teach a lesson about the importance of not stealing. And, more importantly, in the cultural fabric of Marrakesh, in the vivid and saturated colours of the souk, the darkness, the griminess, the shadows, the contrast.
“Morocco is a city of contrast!” she repeats during our conversation. “Everything is surreal about this country. Being here feels like being in a dream state. Nothing makes sense, and so many things are contradicting. Surrealism is the best [mode] to bring that across. I mean, look at the room I’m sitting in right now,” she says as she rotates her laptop to show me.
Surreal is a good descriptor of Benabdallah’s work; her photography is always set in a parallel universe where her models are throwing up Arabic letters, looking into a telescope at an overly-saturated star-filled cyan night sky, posing doe-eyed next to donkeys in elaborate knitted outfits, and whatever else makes sense for the scene. It’s a world that is brought together by vivid imagination, elaborate set designs, and heavy post-production.
Despite all the clashing elements, there is one constant, however, and that is that women are always at the forefront of her portraits, her exploration and unpacking of Moroccan femininity being a running theme throughout her work. In that way, the women around her became her muses, her grandmother in particular becoming the anchor of her kaleidoscopic visual world. A crucial element in her work, she says, especially that older women are not photographed in that way. But, her teta never needs convincing.
In her Rhinestone Ngab series, Benabdallah goes after outdated Western views of Arab femininity, dressing her models in rhinestone-incrusted ngabs, a traditional Moroccan veil that covers the face, which is not to be mistaken for the niqab, and cowboy boots… The Elvis Presley Midwest type. “The ngab is see-through, so in a lot of ways it’s considered sexy, a fashion statement,” she explains. But, to the Western eye, it’s all the same, any piece of clothing covering the face represents submission. Her grandmother, along with several older women from her father’s village, makes an appearance in the series. An “I <3 NY” mug makes its way into one of the photos. In another, a peace sign is sewn into the elderly model’s ngab. All very jarring stuff, even to the craftsmen who helped her put the outfits together.
“The moment you bring in a new idea, it’s tough to get it through. Especially when the craftsmen you work with have particular ways of working. It’s all about testing what works and what doesn’t, and pushing for [new ways of working],” she affirms.
Her deep appreciation for craftsmanship is evident in the work. Actually, it’s an extension of the appreciation she developed growing up among artisans and craftsmen, many of whom she still works with to this day.
“While working on my Al-Astralubiya series, the ma’allim I was working with, the artisan, brought his son along one day. He was probably around 23 years old. I asked him if he was learning anything from his father about his craft and he went like, ‘Oh no, I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in art.’ So, I explained to him what I was working with his father on, and it blew his mind. What your father does IS art! But [craftsmanship] is not seen that way. And it’s sad because that craft is slowly dying out in Morocco [among the younger generations]. And that’s why it’s so important to me to incorporate that kind of work into mine.”
Benabdallah unveiled Al-Astralubiya at the Marrakech edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair earlier this year, where she hung her photographs inside elaborate copper frames inspired by traditional Moroccan patterns, mimicking celestial patterns and bodies as seen in the way astrolabes were crafted. Astrolabes are intricate astronomical instruments historically used to follow the movement of celestial bodies across the sky. So, the photographer’s fascination with the instrument is only natural, given that many were made in Marrakesh between the 8th and 13th centuries. However, her visual exploration of the astrolabe goes beyond the instrument itself, and into the forgotten women of history who worked on developing and improving it, mainly Mariam Al Astrulabi, a Syrian astronomer of the 10th century.
Her grandmother makes another appearance in this series, this time face uncovered, looking upwards into a cyan and star-saturated post- produced night sky with a telescope at hand. She also recruited her cousin to take part, who dons a knitted black and white body suit while sitting on a plastic chair next to a donkey, gazing in the same direction. Above her, the same cyan starry sky looms. In words, it’s hard to make sense of the visual, and at first glance, the viewer might not be sure what they’re looking at beyond a gorgeously produced photo. but that’s a testament to the thorough research that goes into Benabdallah’s concepts. That photograph in particular was part of a haphazard reshoot that involved transporting a donkey into her aunt’s garden, she tells me while laughing. But, the interesting detail, quite literally, is in the suit the model is wearing.
“I worked with a friend on the outfit, we made a replica of an outfit that was worn by muleteers in the Atlas Mountains during the 1930s. It was only worn by men, even knitted by them, which I found so interesting. Because anything related to weaving is always associated with women, it was really interesting for me to see… Especially that the look is very contemporary too. I wanted to kind of play with that and switch the gender roles to have a woman wearing it instead. As for the donkey… I just couldn’t find a mule,” she says with a grin.
The otherworldly portraits have garnered Benabdallah international recognition: her most recent series, Dry Land, features in VICE Magazine’s The Photo Issue 2024, an achievement she excitedly shared on her Instagram with a video carousel of the magazine making its way through the souks of the Medina.
VICE had approached Benabdallah when she first started working on Dry Land, an exploration of traditional Moroccan marriage rituals, and her musings around her femininity as 30 slowly creeps up on her. In her words, it’s “my most vulnerable project yet.” Upon unveiling the photographs, she made a post on her Instagram explaining the different layers of meaning behind these images, sharing the original inspiration behind the visuals: video footage of her parents’ wedding day. In it, her mother is wearing the Labsa Lakbira, a large, weighty, and intricately designed traditional Moroccan bridal gown that engulfs its wearer.
“Growing up in Morocco as a woman, I often felt like my femininity was a shadow, something to conceal rather than celebrate,” she writes. “[This series] is a reflection of that struggle – a dance between beauty and the weight of unspoken sorrows. The Labsa Lakbira is a haunting figure from my childhood, wrapped in tales of brides fainting beneath its splendour. It represents not just tradition but also the profound pressures placed upon us… It is a true celebration of resilience!”
The bridal gown is the centrepiece of the images, laying heavy on the model in front of the lens, who, with a snake slithering under her dress, also wears an ambivalent face as she looks down at the lizard under her in one of the photographs, and stares piercingly back at the viewer in another.
At first, Benabdallah was hesitant to attach her feelings to the work. But, that quickly changed. “A lot of women reached out to me about, really relating to what I wanted to say with those images,” she says. “[So, this series] feels like a rite of passage to me.”
In many ways, the photographer has carved out her own space, years in the making, both as an artist and as a representative of her country, with a very strong intention at the core of her work. Before we end our conversation, I facetiously ask her to summarise her work so far in one word. “Transmission,” she quickly answers. Of heritage, of tradition, of dying craftsmanship, of untold stories, all packaged in a practice that lies somewhere between fashion photography and ethereal ethnography. “Transmission… that’s a good word to end on.” She nods in agreement.
Words: Hadi Afif
