On (The Impossibility of) Autobiography

La cicatrice (The Scar) [Figure 4], by French-Moroccan visual artist Carolle Bénitah, is an image based on a black-and-white photograph taken in Morocco in 1973 or 1974. It shows the artist as a young girl standing next to her older sister and their mother's cousin. The photograph appears to have been damaged, maybe as a result of being carried around in a wallet. A bright red stitch-like needlepoint line, superimposed onto a light gray horizontal crack, divides the image into two parts and partially conceals the two girls’ faces. The embroidered line, added by Bénitah some forty years after the photograph was taken, emerges as an attempt to repair the crack and underlines the sentimental value of the family photograph. At the same time, the red thread highlights what seems to be an accidental mark on a biographical archive, thus throwing into relief the ambiguity of the very notion of the familial in family photography. It also draws attention to the ambiguity of the autobiographical enterprise that Bénitah's gesture implies. The photo-embroidery is a kind of reversed mirror of the anonymity of the original photograph. Indeed, during our conversation in March 2015, after expressing her attachment to the photograph, Bénitah confessed that it was taken by an anonymous street photographer and that she does not remember the circumstances or the date of its shooting, nor the origin of the physical damage that appealed to her.

La cicatrice is part of Photos Souvenirs (2009–2015), a series of mixed-media images that combines family photographs and needlework. The series’ hybridity associates Bénitah's images with those by other women artists originating from Morocco who have risen to fame in the last two decades, using photography in juxtaposition with other media to produce hesitant, multilayered, fragmented, and unfinished life narratives. The content and the aesthetics of her images, as for those produced by Leila Alaoui, Yto Barrada, and Lalla Essaydi, for instance, mobilize and reflect the artist's hyphenated identity—that of a woman born in Morocco and living elsewhere or in-between. Bénitah, Alaoui, Barrada, and Essaydi all use their experiences in various national and cultural spaces and photography to insert a gender perspective into the exploration of cross-culturalism, migration, and displacement.