Hi!

I am glad to meet you around my conference "Scènes et pics" in reference to the series of colonial postcards entitled "Scènes et types".

During colonization in North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), France produced millions of postcards featuring mainly women and girls. This was a propaganda tool to praise the civilization of indigenous peoples but also to sell an eroticized fantasy of these lands to conquer.

The women were staged in traditional, urban or Amazigh outfits, sometimes indoors, sometimes outdoors, naked or not.

North African descendants still suffer today from this orientalist representation and this myth around the "Moorish".

Museums, companies, artists and other producers take advantage of these "royalty-free" images to exhibit the image of these women and profit from it, up to the sale of derivative products exploiting their faces under cover of vintage inspiration and aesthetics which only recall the horror of the colonial era.