There are North Africans who are not afraid of the memory of slavery. The installation, “Erosions”, placed at the heart of an emblematic site in Bordeaux, brought together Bordeaux’s history of the slave trade with the current forms of slavery and negrophobic racism suffered by sub-Saharan populations in the Maghreb.   When Souad El Maysour installs fragments of a universal history in the Darwin Eco-system, a place for experimenting with new relationships with Nature and Life, she takes the path of a collective memory, the scattered elements of which she has meticulously and deferentially collected, and which only the courageous confrontation with her personal history and that of her origins could bring to light.   Souad El Maysour is not just an artist. Nor is she just French. She’s also Moroccan. The child of immigrants, she was deputy mayor of Strasbourg. A committed visual artist, she was one of the first to exhibit her work in a militant effort to evoke the past and future of the millions of bodies that historiography and the romantic vision of caravans crossing the Sahara have omitted for centuries.   A veritable taboo that very few intellectuals have dealt with. We recall the formidable anthropological research of Algerian Malek Chebel, whose book “L’esclavage en terre d’Islam” (2007) opened the pandora’s box. As did Tidiane Ndiaye’s provocative “Génocide voilé” (2008), which demonstrated the barbarity of the criminal mechanism of Arab-Muslim slavery, the consequences of which on the lives of black people were incommensurable. It’s true that another Moroccan, Chouki El Hamel, a historian in Arizona, has just published “Le Maroc Noir, une histoire de la race et de l’esclavage en Islam” (2019). The first presentation of this book in France took place on May 18 in Bordeaux, at the same time as Souad El Maysour’s exhibition.   “I discovered the extent of this denial one day when I wanted to find Slave Square in the Medina of Fez. The city of my ancestors had a market, like other Moroccan cities. It continued to be supplied, at least until the early 20th century, by Mauritanian routes, particularly along the coast. Yet I couldn’t find a single indication or trace… ” Souad El Maysour.   Faithful to an artistic approach free of public commissions, and determined to name this memory that is still alive and so much missed by the world, Souad El Maysour chose to offer her “political act” through the choice of an associative organization, Mémoires & Partages, which for over twenty years, in France and Senegal, has been teaching a history whose topicality requires us to get rid of the blinkers that colonial history and independence have installed in our imaginations.   And so, quite naturally, the artist begins his fictional history in southern Morocco, with a sensitive evocation of the places and imaginations of the populations brought together by the history of exploitation.   On the path of a past and a heritage still alive, porous to all the winds of the desert, Souad El Maysour fires on every word, text, word, image, sound and object, which she links to this universal history by installing them in a huge tent donated by the women of southern Morocco.   It all begins in two spaces opened up by the tenuous threads of a memory to be rediscovered. An installation space and a video space in which the artist invites us on an uncompromising journey into a time, a space and forms that summon up the stories that make us who we are. Salt stones, photographs, plaster casts, ropes, burlap bags, sounds and tents mediate this loss of memory.   The wandering thus begins with continuous images on two televisions that install a climate of intimacy in a Moroccan oasis where the artist, aided by the association La Caravane de Tighmart, carried out a residency between 2017-2018. Tighmart, near Goulimine, is the inaugural scene where testimonies and movements of white and black bodies arrange the separate solitudes of descendants of black captives (Abid) and descendants of white Arab slaveholders (Beidan). Drawing on Greco-Roman heritage, and in a kind of performance-video, Souad El Maysour, with the complicity of two descendants, overturns the Podonipsia ritual that Arab-Muslim populations still use in social relations.   Under the tent, these relationships, exacerbated by the violence of slavery, are brought to the fore by camel harnesses holding sculpted hands and feet, molded but cut to recall the corporal punishments to which African captives could be subjected.   “Silk from Aleppo, fabrics from India, perfumes, coffee from Yemen, pious books and also some Abyssinian Negresses much sought-after in Morocco, or Bornou Negroes considered more resistant than the others and which, as late as 1866, were sold in Fez at prices 50% higher than those paid for Sudanese Negroes.” (Jean-Louis Miège, Le Maroc et l’Europe (1830-1894), Paris, PUF, 1961).   The columns of the Manufacture de Darwin (a former military barracks on Bordeaux’s right bank), which the passage of time had prepared for this installation, ended up supporting images of the former “slave market” of the city of Fés, today’s souk L’Marqtane, where captives awaited their next executioner.   “According to the legend once widespread among slaves, those who avoided eating salt became light enough to fly back to their homeland.” (Patricia Kaersenhout, L’âme du sel).   In the end, it is through salt, the first currency of exchange between men, as were the African captives, that Souad El Maysour evokes the possible universal of a collaborative nature between man and animal.   Through “gift and counter-gift”, the artist has blocks of stone sculpted by the tongues of cows and sheep. The sculptural abstraction of these forms makes them the messengers of texts in Koufi script relating to the sale of African captives, punishment and emancipation. A kind of Arab-Muslim black code, made all the more unbearable by the stylistic beauty of the forms.   May the luminous interstices drawn by Souad El Maysour allow the Black people of the Maghreb to emerge, break the oblivion of their condition and participate in the democratic opening up of Arab-Muslim societies.   Karfa Sira DIALLO