How to Tame a Wild Tongue

I investigate into the suppression and generational loss of Tamazight, Indigenous language of the Amazigh of Morocco. Personal and collective memory, archives and traces of communication, I examine what remains when a mother tongue is no longer passed on.

At the age of ten, MAryam Touzani let go of her ancestral tongue; where the Tamazight language lives on in her mother’s voice, it no longer comes fluently to the artist, who describes this long-term ‘silence’ as akin to a lingering ‘shadow’, continuing to shape her sense of self. Like many of Touzani’s projects, How to Tame a Wild Tongue probes at themes of absence and loss, though here it expand further outwards: in Morocco, the broader decline of Tamazight, beyond the artist’s domestic sphere, can be read as a direct result of colonial erasure, which forced an entire culture into the periphery.

Displaced in time by French and Arabic, Tamazight was banned in Moroccan schools under colonial rule, marginalised in the decades after independence, and only recognised as an official language in the 2011 constitution after a period of seismic civil unrest. Intertwining the experience of personal loss with the wider implications of systemic repression, How to Tame a Wild Tongue asks: how to picture a language, a lost language, or its absence? But rather than restoring that which has been lost, the project becomes a counter-archive of survival, staging incompleteness as resistance, and insisting that what remains – however fractured and fragile – is still worth carrying forward.

Small extra note: Many of these images pass through several generations of reproduction, screen grabs, rephotographed prints, images lifted from archives that were never meant to hold them. Each pass loses resolution, the picture grows coarser, some detail is always left behind. That degradation isn't a flaw to correct; it mirrors the way the language itself has been transmitted and legible, but never quite whole.