In Conversation: Aïda Sidhoum
This interview was conducted on the occasion of the exhibition A song within a song within a song on view at the Hessel Museum of Art, April 6 - May 26, 2024, curated by Aïda Sidhoum.
Installation views from A song within a song within a song, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, April 6 – May 26, 2024. Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Aïda Sidhoum. Photo: Olympia Shannon 2024.
Charlotte Youkilis: A song within a song brings together artists engaging with African and Afro-diasporic musical activities from the 1990s to the 2010s, within the francophone context. It frames genres like French hip-hop and R&B, zouk, raï, and coupé-décalé as necessarily cross-Mediterranean and cross-Atlantic. How did you establish these temporal boundaries?
Aïda Sidhoum: I grew up in France and was born in 2001, so hip-hop had been around for about a decade already. Nowadays, hip-hop and its derived genres are the most listened-to categories in France. My interest for francophone popular music originally came from the specificity of hip-hop in the French language: this music always seemed to be influenced not just by what was happening in the US but also by what artists were quoting from other musical legacies and geographies. For example, the group IAM, one of the earliest hip-hop collectives, made extensive use of chaâbi samples from North Africa in their very first records. This was because so much of this music was played and available on cassette tapes in Marseille. Another example would be the project of the zouk love genre, formulated by Jean-Michel Rotin, who slowed down the tempo of Caribbean zouk music and mixed it with R&B influences in his album Solo (1996.) Today, a lot of contemporary pop music references zouk and R&B within single tracks, Aya Nakamura being the greatest and most brilliant example of this. The 1990s were a formative period where zouk, raï, Congolese rumba and coupé décalé formed strong ties to hip-hop and R&B through the experimentations of artists who traveled and migrated across francophone geographies, across the Atlantic and across the Mediterranean. The geographic and temporal overlays that came out of it give an understanding, through music, of the French-speaking world. I find it more representative and sensitive than the one that the French language enforces. The 2010s boundary was slightly arbitrary but also allowed for an art historical argument: not so long ago, it seemed harder to come across writing that would explicitly observe these layers. For this project, I was so inspired by the recent archival efforts of writers such as Rhoda Tchokokam, artists and cultural practitioners such as Marie-Julie Chalu or Christelle Oyiri, who gave these histories rigorous and intimate forms. I couldn’t have done this exhibition without their work, so it was an honor to be able to involve them.
CY: At what point did the reductive classifications of ‘world’ and ‘urban’ music emerge?
AS: I think these categories were there from the start of my research because they have been omnipresent as the marketing keywords of choice in the Euro-American music industry, for the genres I was looking into. They’ve been refused and criticized for a long time. I was interested in how these racialized terms keep so many genres enclosed outside of the ‘popular.’ How incorrect and harmful that can be, but also in whether there’s potential in the failure of these categories. They don’t describe much and it’s generative to think about what they can’t grasp, the possibilities that exist outside of them and the histories that were written outside of the consideration of classification. I think these categories are completely irrelevant but, somehow, they can be written against in a way that subverts their vagueness and protects the strong, intimate and collective worlds that these genres have grown and maintained.
CY: I am curious about your engagement with the repetition of music through modern recording, broadcasting, and streaming technologies. The repeatedness allows for a dislocation of the song’s original time and space. In what ways does that shift the nature of these songs?
AS: I think what shifts the nature of these songs is how their repetition can attach them to a different time and space, where they find a new meaning and where one relates to it in a different way. In the context of human mobility and diasporas, this gains a particular dimension: when my parents or my grandmothers listen to a song about migration for example, or about Algeria, it will not be the same reaction or experience as when I do, because we don’t have the same relations to the geographies we lived in or in between, and we don’t have the same geographic centers and peripheries. I love that I might care about certain things that they wouldn’t care about, or that I might think a song from the time of their youth is incredible whereas they used to hate it back then, and that they laugh with me about it! And sometimes, we love the same old or new music, or we point resemblances to each other that we notice in a track: the repetition of songs is almost a way of seeing each other through social histories and beyond the scope of it too.
This is really basic but I am so inspired by how songs are elements of culture that can be easily transported and repeated, from someone humming it in the car, to musicians covering it or playing it live or recorded. It feels really precious and yet common when we talk more broadly (and sometimes in a fetishistic way) about traditions of orality. Songs are ‘repeated’ so much and so often that their movements can become unexpected and untraceable. There’s two important dynamics at play there: acknowledging and giving credit to songs that were stolen or quoted without recognition, which happened a lot, and also embracing the fugitivity and permanence of their traces and repetitions throughout time and across sites. This last aspect seems to protect a world of relations that might be best kept intimate.
CY: The artists on view situate these histories of music within the realm of visual culture. I am thinking about Christelle Oyiri’s video installation WAR!CLUB!ACTION! (2022) and Katia Kameli’s video work Aïcha (2001). Could you speak a little to each of these works? How do Oyiri and Kameli embody that relationship between visual and sonic?
AS: The practice of Christelle Oyiri, also known as CRYSTALLMESS, was fundamental in the early stages of my research. She has a deep understanding and experience with francophone and non-francophone music through being a DJ and playing for crowds all over the world. I knew of her as a DJ before I learned about her practice in visual arts. As a DJ, she’s an incredible story-teller, in deep interaction with the tracks, their contexts, and the audience. Whether in a sonic or visual way, she makes a very particular mark that intertwines the radical imagining of struggles and the poetics and dystopia of music genres evolve. There’s an imaging process at play when she DJs because she projects these stories and on the other hand, her image-based practice in the visual arts comes from sonic sources, oral histories and music. In WAR!CLUB!ACTION!, she works through and beyond the limitations of primary oral sources on the history of coupé décalé (a trailblazing early 2000 electronic music genre from Ivory Coast) to memorialize its creator Douk Saga and the spaces in which this music was fostered.
I see Katia Kameli’s visual practice as tied to sound as well, but with a different perceptibility: I understand her overall practice as taking stories passed on orally as starting points, such as myths, metaphors, songs. She takes them seriously, casts a critical eye on it while also caring for their histories and emphasizing their legitimacy and potential. Even with some of her works that don’t involve sound, the visual components seem to be produced through the traces of verbal transmissions. Her video installation Aïcha is a more explicit inquiry into the sonic, because it dwells on the history and temporal context of a very famous raï song. I was particularly excited about showing this work because we installed it differently than it was in the past: she was thinking about how, because of the DV format of the video, it was more often shown on small old TV monitors. As a result, the sound would spill into the space more than the image of the woman performing domestic labor. Since her reflection on the song was also one that challenged the masculine memory of raï, she thought about how to give the image more space, and suggested having a reflective surface for projection to also make the moving image step outside of the frame and into the gallery.
CY: The material and visual culture of raï has been of significant interest to Kameli, from her series of performances Mon anthologie du raï to her video work Ya Rayi. Her practice, more broadly, has worked to deconstruct male-dominated histories of Algeria. Is this something you considered for the exhibition?
AS: Raï has been one of the most written-about genres in cultural studies about the SWANA region and also has been much discussed in France for the past decade. People seemed to be really fascinated with frameworks of interpretation around tradition and degrees of religiosity, because raï was relatively unconcerned with it or not centered around it. It’s ironic that some scholars tied it back to these aspects. As the history of the genre gets more documented, the gender politics and relations of this music continue to be at risk of being left unaccounted for. For example, Cheikha Rimitti, Cheba Fadela, Cheba Zahouania are singers with important legacies that typically were not written about as much as their male counterparts. Their gazes and voices are inherent to the genre, but when scholars or journalists wrote about notions of gender in raï, it was often done through the music of male singers. There’s a large aspect of social relations and social dissent that Katia Kameli really centers when she works on the history of raï. She focuses on this genre through the lens of the underground and dynamics of power post-liberation. I think in this context, her practice is really precious, because she digs into historical truths that expand the tight confines of how history got written and retroactively rendered peaceful something that was disruptive, not just in Algeria but also in a transnational way. With the series of programming that is Mon anthologie du raï, I really appreciate that she thought through modes of performance to display a history of this music, because it centers both in content and in form the social roots of raï and reactivates its potential.
CY: I want to speak briefly about the exhibition’s accompanying publication, An Open Anthology of Afro-French Songs, for which you translated original texts and interviews from French by Rhoda Tchokokam, Hadj Sameer, Louisa Yousfi, and Marie-Julie Chalu. I was struck by the extended notes on translation for specific phrases and meanings. How did the translation process unfold for you?
AS: It’s in this process of translation that what I was doing curatorially really became visible to me. All of the texts and the contributors that are in the publications are some of the people whose work I was guided by. Getting really close to their materials, translating them in a concrete way, and chatting with them about this passage into the English language and potentially outside of original audiences was essential and created coherence with every curatorial aspect. Through conversations, and through reading more theoretical texts on translation and the untranslatable, we worked through the footnotes in a way that balanced making something clear and letting it keep its agency. These questions around notes were the same questions that were guiding the exhibition! We also made small choices such as not italicizing the names of the music genres which technically should have been italicized because they were not recognized by dictionaries.
CY: How did you determine the archival images and translated lyrics interspersed through the book?
AS: I was working with Rhoda Tchokokam, Marie-Julie Chalu and Hadj Sameer on the texts, so I asked for their guidance, and they shared some images and songs with me. On my end, I wrote extended captions and added a few images. I am really happy that it happened through this formal collaboration because it added an archival dimension to the texts! In Rhoda Tchokokam’s case for example, her beautiful book Sensibles, Une histoire du R&B français, didn’t have images: it is in granular collaborative acts of mediation and addition such as this one that I understood what could be a curatorial input. Also, these images and songs made it into the show in a way as they were contributed to the Black Med musical archive started by the artist duo Invernomuto, which is staged and plays continuously in the gallery space.
CY: The last page directs readers to an accompanying playlist by Hlou Project, with songs by Melgroove, Cheikha Rimitti, Aya Nakamura, and more. Could you describe Hlou Project, and any upcoming plans for the platform?
AS: I didn’t even think anyone would notice that honestly! I really appreciate that you did. A few days before the publication was going to print, Tuan Quoc Pham (the graphic designer I worked with for this book) asked me if I wanted to hide a little something on the last page, so I made a YouTube playlist with the songs from the different chapters. I used the account from a curatorial platform that I founded a few years ago in France, before I came to the US. The platform is called Hlou, which means ‘sugary’ in Arabic but is also a colloquial term to say something or someone is cute, in French slang as well as in North-African dialects. I liked that it was slightly hard to pronounce for people unfamiliar with the word. I was working on this project before, with the intention of holding virtual and physical space for North-African artists and cultural practitioners in France. I was faced with challenges and I realized I wasn’t trained enough, or had a bit of an imposter syndrome when I was speaking with people from the contemporary art world, which is why I applied to the graduate program at CCS Bard. I am hoping to pick it up again in a few months and I might change the foundations of it to open it up to a wider range of practices and a bigger set of questions on how to navigate and escape the dynamics of visual arts in a French context. And actually, I think Hlou always remained close to this project: when I started it in 2020, I was mentored by Yard, a multi-form creative agency that does really special work for popular music and narratives around popular culture. I think this goes to show how communities formed around music can sustain possibilities for a lot of different cultural practices.