The exhibition includes the much-anticipated film Continental Drift (2021). The film-collage assembles Super 8mm film diaries, footage taken over eight years across the US and Morocco, including the rituals of the Grand Socco plaza, home of the Cinematheque de Tanger, the arthouse and cultural center which Barrada founded in 2006. The film also offers a first glimpse of The Mothership, a forest garden and botanical garden of dye plants, and artist residency, founded by the artist. Continental Drift also introduces Tangier characters like the Public Writer; and, as narrator of sorts, an english autodidact who collects Magic Lantern slides and channels local history. In a brief, chilling sequence, the camera has a close encounter with the aging thug who ‘disappeared” Barrada’s own grandfather in the 1950’s. 

The intersection of cinema and the archive, themes that often recur in her practice, bring attention to the rigidity of zones and territories while also considering the struggles of sovereignty and migratory flows. 

In the turbulent summer of 1966,Yto Barrada’s mother, a 23-year-old Moroccan student, was one of 50 ‘Young African Leaders’ invited on a State Department–sponsored tour of the USA.Through play, poetry, and humor, the film Tree Identification for Beginners examines this stage- managed encounter between North America and Africa, and the nascent spirit of disobedience – the Pan-African,Tricontinental, Black Power, and anti-Vietnam war movements – that would come to define a generation.The film brings together 16mm stop-motion animation of Montessori educational toys with voiceovers from Barrada’s mother and other Crossroads Africa participants, as well as historic figures such as Civil Rights activist Stokely Carmichael.The audio effects were created by Barrada and professional Foley artists using noise-making tools in a sound studio.Tree Identification for Beginners also embodies Barrada’s research into form, abstraction, and spatial organization; the installation includes curtains hand- stitched with Montessori grammatical symbols and dyed with pre-industrial colors.

The Moroccan-French artist’s first performance abstractly combines archival research, family history, film, textile painting, and toys to explore the story of her mother’s coming to terms with Pan-African and Black Power political movements while visiting the U.S. in 1966, as part of the Operation Crossroads Africa program.

Through humour, works such as Mnemonic  Phrases (2019) explore mnemonic devices beyond their linguistic function, placing them within the rhythm of history where found sentences, much like found objects,  perform themselves. Fragments of materials interact with each other as self-made tools that inspire new techniques — for instance,  cardboard cutouts from the collaged works in Grinding Teeth (2020)  are often used as paintbrushes to create other paintings, suggesting synchronicity across mediums.