DAR MHANI (short-film)
Biennale de Bamako, 2026
Dar Mhani is a project rooted in the house where I grew up in Rabat, Morocco, designed and built by my father, architect and artist Azzedine Baddou.
Built over several decades, the house was conceived as a living organism rather than a finished architectural object. Its walls, rooms and structures continually evolved, incorporating salvaged materials, construction leftovers, found objects and fragments from other places. Nothing was fixed; everything could be transformed, reused, displaced or given a new function.
Returning to this space years later, I approach the house as both an archive and a landscape of memory. Through photography, film, objects and installation, the project explores the traces left by a family, the passage of time, and the ways in which a place can carry multiple lives within itself.
Dar Mhani is less a portrait of a house than an exploration of inheritance: what we receive from the places we grow up in, what we transform, and what remains after we leave...
