MARYAM TOUZANI


How to Tame a Wild Tongue
Maktub
Argania
Burned Landscapes

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How to Tame a Wild Tongue                    2025 - ongoing 





Desired Landscape, 2025
Vessel, 2026
Peñón de Alhucemas, 2026
At the age of ten, Maryam Touzani let go of her ancestral tongue; where the Tamazight language lives on in her mother’s voice, it no longer comes fluently to the artist, who describes this long-term ‘silence’ as akin to a lingering ‘shadow’, continuing to shape her sense of self. Like many of Touzani’s projects, How to Tame a Wild Tongue probes at themes of absence and loss, though here it expand further outwards: in Morocco, the broader decline of Tamazight, beyond the artist’s domestic sphere, can be read as a direct result of colonial erasure, which forced an entire culture into the periphery. 

Displaced in time by French and Arabic, Tamazight was banned in Moroccan schools under colonial rule, marginalised in the decades after independence, and only recognised as an official language in the 2011 constitution after a period of seismic civil unrest. Intertwining the experience of personal loss with the wider implications of systemic repression, How to Tame a Wild Tongue asks: how to picture a language, a lost language, or its absence? But rather than restoring that which has been lost, the project becomes a counter-archive of survival, staging incompleteness as resistance, and insisting that what remains – however fractured and fragile – is still worth carrying forward.