In Essaouira, as part of the Human Rights Forum for the 26th edition of the Gnaoua Festival 2025, artists, researchers and thinkers together sketched out a sensitive map of creation in motion.
On June 20 and 21, 2025, the old Mogador hosted the 12th edition of the Human Rights Forum, now an essential part of the Gnaoua and World Music Festival. Under the theme “Migrations and tomorrow’s cultural creations”, a round table brought together four voices: Belgian-Moroccan poet Taha Adnan, Franco-Romanian sociologist Dana Diminescu, French historian Yvan Gastaut, and Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, to consider the impact of mobility.
Taha Adnan opened the session with a reading of one of his poems, taken from “Chachatou Alaykoum”, a text written in 2002, in which inner exile, digital illusion and social disillusionment are superimposed. Between absurd humor and disenchanted critique, he tells of “ the forest that isn’t forest, the desert that doesn’t look like desert”, but above all, a deceptive hyperconnection. Taha Adnan pointed to this new silent censor by saying: “Today, it is called an algorithm.”
For the poet, this algorithmic intrusion into the poetic word, this diktat of legibility imposed by networks, undermines the very essence of creation. A plea for an art that escapes formats, filters and injunctions to “make sense” immediately.
Dana Diminescu, a pioneering sociologist of migration in the digital age, continues this critical look. In a world now permanently connected, exile is no longer a clean break, but a hybrid state: She says that «We migrate with a phone, we maintain links, we split into two. You live here and there at the same time. «This double attachment, which is also a double absence, transforms not only the narratives of migration, but also the forms of creation. And while technologies enable us to forge links, they also impose a globalized, ready-to-share aesthetic model.
“ In the circulation and in this time of borders...that these new technologies allow, it’s something that can be quite positive, while considering, indeed, that there is a dimension of uniformization, of standardization”, explained Yvan Gastaut.
A warning against the nuanced commodification of migrants’ pain, exploited through seductive but misleading images.
Selma SAOULI
