Artist and SMArt

When preparing her residence, Btihal Remli proposed to work on mountain farming. Based on her personal experience in the mountains of Morocco, she thought she could document the remnants of a vernacular activity in the Valais Alps. But once there, she was confronted with a different reality, far from idealized images conveyed by marketing and tourism. This tension between a vernacular that became a brand and the contemporaneity of the ways of life and production in the mountain is the central theme of the work of Btihal Remli. Her photographs highlight the new dynamics at play in the mountains, between tradition and modernity.

In a second series resulting from her work in Morocco, Btihal Remli wanted to show the nourishing pasture, a term that corresponds to this function of cattle breeding in much of the territory of the valleys of the High Atlas, inhabited by small communities Berbers, of which only a few families still practice nomadic grazing. In general, the women of the family, the mother and her young daughters, are dependent on the animals. Men are not numerous and not very present. Women bear the full weight of everyday life. Nothing new, but these female presences that ensure the survival of an entire territory are gaining visibility, power and therefore autonomy.

Btihal Remli thus confronts, through her two series of photographs, two similar and radically different worlds, two stages of an intelligent photographic work in action.