How Hiba Baddou Blends Moroccan Heritage and Futurism in Her Art
Born in Rabat and shaped by Moroccan visual culture, Hiba Baddou is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice dissolves boundaries between film, photography, painting, performance, and art direction. Guided by a deep fascination with identity, ritual, and language, she creates a world where retro-futuristic aesthetics meet ancestral memory, and where storytelling becomes both an act of preservation and reinvention.
After studying filmmaking at EICAR in Paris, where she earned the school’s top awards for direction and cinematography, Baddou refined her distinctive visual vocabulary through a master’s in Art Direction at Penninghen. Her work has since traveled across major institutions and international stages, and her multidisciplinary project Paraboles and award-winning film The Sacralization of Images have further cemented her as one of the most intriguing emerging voices exploring the politics of imagery and migration.
Equally at home in collaborative and experimental spaces, Baddou has crafted visual identities for musicians such as David August, Manu Chao, Keziah Jones, and Amadou & Mariam, while her passion for calligraphy and improvisation has led to live performances at institutions including the ICA in London.
Through every medium she touches, Hiba Baddou expands the possibilities of contemporary art, inviting viewers into an immersive universe where tradition, imagination, and the future coexist in powerful dialogue.
Interview by Daniela Selva
Your work blends Moroccan traditions with retro-futuristic aesthetics. How do you imagine the future of Moroccan visual culture, and where do you see your work positioned within that future?
I imagine Moroccan visual culture moving toward a space where ancestral knowledge and technological imagination are no longer perceived as opposites. Our traditions have always been futurist in their own way, rooted in cycles, symbols, and invisible transmissions. My work tries to inhabit that tension: a place where the past isn’t a weight but a propulsion system. I see myself contributing to a future Moroccan visual language that is porous, speculative, and unafraid to reconfigure identity beyond nostalgia or exotification.
You work fluidly across film, painting, photography, and performance. Are there emotional states or ideas that can only be expressed in one medium but not the others?
Yes, each medium has a temperature and each story its medium. Cinema allows me to explore duration, the breath of a moment, its metaphysics, the power of sound as well. Photography is where I confront the instant, the apparition, the speculation. Painting holds my most intimate states; it’s where silence becomes material. Performance, on the other hand, is alive, unstable, it’s where the body thinks before the mind, also a way to fight vulnerability in front of a crowd. Some emotions need velocity, others need stillness. I move between mediums as if shifting between languages.
What role does improvisation play in your creative process, especially from your deep engagement with music and calligraphy?
Improvisation is essential in my practice, it makes me engage with my intuition. I grew up between rhythms, between the fluidity of spoken dialects. Music taught me that repetition is a form of transe. The imaginary langages that I express through calligraphy taught me that a gesture can carry centuries and feelings that no other form of typography makes me feel. When I create, I let the structure guide me but I leave space for accidents, those moments where intuition reveals what thought cannot, and it makes me feel very human too.
What parts of your cultural heritage feel most urgent to preserve or reinterpret today?
Our relationship to the invisible. Moroccan culture is rich in rituals, oral memories, cosmic imagination. These are often dismissed as folklore, yet they contain profound ways of understanding the world, especially in a time of ecological and spiritual disorientation. I’m interested in preserving these forms of knowledge, but through reinterpretation, not reconstruction. They need to keep breathing.
As a Moroccan woman working internationally, how do you handle the expectations spoken or unspoken about representing your culture?
I navigate them carefully but I don’t let them define me. There is often an expectation that artists from the Global South perform their identity in a legible way. I prefer to speak from multiplicity, not from a fixed position. My work is Moroccan, but also diasporic, feminine, speculative, and hybrid. I choose to represent my culture through complexity, not through a single narrative.
We live in a time where borders are political, emotional, and digital. How do you approach the idea of “movement” in your work—migration, exile, return, or transformation?
Movement is the gravitational field of my practice. For me, migration is not only geopolitical; it’s emotional, linguistic, even generational. In the Hertz Republic, the characters are suspended between frequencies, neither here nor there. I’m interested in that in-between space where identities are not fixed but vibrating. Movement is both a wound and a possibility.
In an era where art has become increasingly global, what do you feel is the next frontier for African and Arab contemporary visual culture?
I think the next frontier is sovereignty, not only political or economic, but aesthetic. Creating new mythologies rather than responding to Western expectations. Inventing languages, not just images that people would expect. Developing infrastructures that allow us to dream on our own terms, in our own countries. The future lies in building ecosystems where African and Arab artists can experiment without translation or permission.
Is there an image, sound, or memory that you return to again and again as a kind of creative anchor?
Yes, a very simple one: the wind. As a child, it felt like the sky was whispering. That cosmic hum became a metaphor for desire, and especially for imagination. I return to it constantly.
What’s a question that no one has ever asked you one you wish someone would?
Perhaps: “Where does your imagination rest?”
People often ask what fuels my imagination, but rarely what quiets it. Wind, the desert, and water are where my internal landscape resets.
What's next for you?
I’m developing a new multidisciplinary project around water. I’m also working on a new film, a series of paintings, a performance, and upcoming exhibitions in Morocco and abroad.
And last but not least, what are your greatest inspirations or influences?
My influences oscillate between the intimate and the cosmic: oral traditions, retro-futurist cinema, music, calligraphy, childhood memories, satellite imagery, and all the invisible forces that shape how we inhabit the world.
Portrait of the artist Hiba Baddou © Léo Geoffrion
The Imaginary Alphabet (DavidXAugust.com)
Hertzian Prayer I (Prière hertzienne), 60 × 90 cm
Works below courtesy of the artist hibabaddou.com
