Habitar el borde

This work is constructed from the margins, from a displaced gaze that interrogates the limits of representation, territory and the body. Habitar el borde is a visual and poetic investigation of the in-between spaces, those that have no name or centre, but where a radical form of existence and resistance is inscribed.

I inhabit the edges, the margins and the unspoken words of history. I write in the blank part of the texts. I find myself in the thickness of a picture frame, in the face of the pedestal that covers the floor, in the undocumented part of an action, in the buried fragment of history. I place myself in the out-of-place with a divided, partial perception, perceiving the world from inside and outside. A body without a border, inhabiting a threshold, a transit, a liminal space, between two oppressive powers. In those places located in between, in those spaces of difference that do not belong to the here and there, that do not succumb to binarism. These are the scenarios where the poetics that give shape and place to this work are gestated. 

I was a body thrown out of itself, a body lost between places... Now I inhabit the division, the narrative thread on which I walk, the crack of a point in between that separates one world from another.

Youssef Taki
 

Youssef Taki is an artist and researcher. Her work is situated at the intersection between artistic practice and academic research, combining methodologies from colonial studies, decolonial theory and her own experience as a migrant in Spain. Through her work, she explores how colonial and post-colonial structures continue to shape everyday life, memory and the representation of bodies marked by borders.

Her pieces address self-representation, interculturality, territoriality and the struggle for cultural representation, using images and archives as tools of resistance. She has participated in national and international exhibitions and meetings in venues such as the Dakar Biennial, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Larnaca Biennial, the FAD in Barcelona, the Mena Art Gallery in Berlin, the Ateneo in Madrid and the TEA Contemporary Biennial in Tenerife, together with the Al'Akhawat collective, of which she is a member. She is the author of the book Fuera de lugar (2022) and has developed multiple research and creation projects that explore memory, imaginaries and visual narratives, questioning hegemonic discourses and proposing new forms of representation from poetics and cultural resistance.