Lived Intensity in Algorithmic Bubbles | Inside Out: A Conversation with Yasmine Laraqui
- ELSEHERE
- 4 days ago
- 13 min read
Yasmine Laraqui’s work deeply explores questions of identity, platform capitalism, and surveillance architecture to investigate the fluid mechanics of human belonging, focusing on a multidisciplinary artistic practice that spans visual media, curatorial projects, and speculative fiction. Navigating the liminal spaces between traditional North African heritage and globalized digital systems, Laraqui’s practice spans photography, painting, installation, and literature. Her visual work strips away traditional societal codes to observe insular subcultures and marginal spaces, transforming the image from a simple aesthetic object into a live sociological experiment. In this edited text-based conversation, Laraqui reflects on this multi-layered practice, discussing her ongoing mission to build sustainable cultural infrastructures from Casablanca.
Before the Work Had a Name
Formation, memory, early perception, and what still operates beneath the work
ELSEHERE: Before you had a name for what you were doing, was there an earlier way you understood yourself in relation to images, culture, or the world?
Yasmine Laraqui: I believe it was entirely rooted in a process of acculturation. At the time, I was far too young to consciously analyze the competing cultural codes shaping my adolescent identity. Growing up in Casablanca while navigating a French education system, watching American television, and absorbing MTV hits created a highly globalized lifestyle—one we adopted instinctively without fully decoding its structural meaning. Ultimately, regardless of how much my younger self desired to write, paint, or anchor herself philosophically, my entry into art began as an identity crisis.
Today, we operate under the assumption that culture seamlessly transcends physical borders, imagining that hyper-connected individuals live identical lives irrespective of nationality. However, this phenomenon applies strictly to contemporary fashion systems and consumer networks, rather than traditional heritage codes. I suspect my adolescent self was escaping the complexities of the latter by retreating into the surface textures of the former. Lacking a clear understanding of my own position, I relied on mimetics as a strategy for belonging, clinging to an exported culture with which I shared aesthetic codes and mainstream Western ideologies.
ELSEHERE: Your work moves through questions of identification, cultural codes, and the instability of belonging. Looking back, was there an early experience of being both inside and outside a culture that quietly shaped the way you now think and work?
Yasmine Laraqui: So I lived in Paris for five years, and at the time I was taking photographs. I used to hang in very queer surroundings, and my work back then reflected that. During my five years living in Paris, my photographic practice was deeply embedded within queer subcultures, and the work I produced naturally mirrored those spaces. While these images gained visibility through various festivals, art fairs, and exhibitions, I quickly noticed a specific shift in how audiences engaged with them. The conversation consistently gravitated toward the subjects themselves, highlighting a palpable cultural friction. There was an undeniable gap between my position as a Moroccan woman originating from Casablanca and this distinctly French LGBTQ+ community.
This cultural intersection was precisely what captivated international viewers. Although I was intimately engaged in these spaces, I was acutely aware of my status as a visitor—a temporary observer within that specific element. It became clear that certain expressions of personal liberty were readily actionable in France, yet remained highly restricted or unmapped within the public sphere of my home country. This aesthetic misalignment even led several journalists to mistakenly assume I was French, based entirely on my subject matter. That period exposed a profound conflict between institutional expectations of what a Moroccan artist should produce versus the reality of what actually emerges from our lived experiences.
Practice, Research, Method
The center of the practice, method, form, and how research enters the work
ELSEHERE: Across photography, painting, experimental visual forms, writing, curating, and platform-building, what is the question, pressure, or condition that most consistently organizes your practice?
Yasmine Laraqui: The central, recurring pressure is determining how to establish a truly sustainable ecosystem for creative practices within Casablanca and the broader Moroccan landscape. While it is true that we have inherited a structural framework for freedom of expression over the last several years, this potential has yet to be fully expanded or utilized to its absolute capacity. The critical milestone we are waiting for is sustainability.
Since the inception of my career at twenty years old, my focus has consistently gravitated toward anchoring our emerging local scene into the global contemporary art map. This impulse is the primary reason I continue this work today. We all begin as emerging creators navigating an incredibly hostile economic landscape where public budgets are rarely allocated to contemporary art or cultural preservation. Confronting this lack of institutional support made me realize that my practice is fundamentally about platform-building rather than standalone artistic execution. Even as an art student painting and taking photographs, I felt a sharper urgency to curate exhibitions, establish independent non-profit organizations, and design communal structures that give artists the literal space to sustain their labor.
ELSEHERE: Your work often engages digital culture, memory, speculative futures, and algorithmic power. At what point did you begin to feel that image-making was inseparable from the systems that circulate, sort, and monetize images?
Yasmine Laraqui: I felt this tension very early on. In 2012, while running an independent, highly experimental non-profit art collective, I was simultaneously granted an opportunity to present my first photography solo show in a conventional, commercial gallery in Casablanca. This dual positioning exposed the aggressive reality of the global art market—a system where everything is designed for immediate financial monetization.
At twenty-two, I lacked the cynicism required to fully take that commercial machine seriously; my ideals were entirely detached from straightforward profit-making mechanics, and I was far more consumed by experimental, unprecedented visual forms. I simply refused to comply with traditional market demands, despite the bright institutional signs encouraging me to do so. It took years of hindsight to fully grasp the systemic compliance demanded of a 'commercially successful' artist. That early exposure crystallized the realization that the contemporary image cannot be untangled from the institutional and capitalist apparatuses that validate, sort, and price it.
ELSEHERE: You have written about the commodification of emotions and about the way algorithmic structures shape perception. What do you think images are doing to us now that they were not doing before, or not doing with this intensity?
Yasmine Laraqui: The shift is not actually about what images are doing to us, but rather what human beings are doing to one another through the medium of the image. The image itself does not speak in a vacuum; it is deployed by an individual who chooses to externalize their interiority to provoke a specific, calculated emotional response. The current intensity of visual culture stems from a profound mutation in human behavior regarding self-exposure and digital performance.
With the contemporary rise of hyper-amateurism, audiences no longer look exclusively to institutional galleries, curators, or art critics to validate what makes them feel something. A raw, technically unpolished photograph uploaded by an amateur can hold devastating emotional weight because of the pure intentionality behind it. While institutional art pieces are increasingly designed to satisfy intellectual irony or amusement, it is this unmediated, amateur content that forces us to confront raw psychological truths. We ingest hundreds of thousands of images daily, but the visuals that permanently alter our consciousness are no longer formal masterpieces. They are the fragments of regular people trading their lived intensity on a hyper-commodified social marketplace engineered entirely to monetize human attention.
ELSEHERE: You describe your work as a process of de-contextualizing codes and conduct, and of reshaping accepted beliefs through discomfort, confusion, and reflection. What kind of transformation are you actually seeking there: perceptual, social, emotional, political, or all of these at once?
Yasmine Laraqui: I view my practice as an act of clear statement rather than active, interventional research. I am not consciously attempting to de-contextualize reality; rather, I am a direct witness to a de-contextualization that is already actively occurring across our social fabric. I am an observer, not an actor.
That being said, the resulting friction triggers all of these transformations simultaneously. When capturing these images, I look for a specific symbiosis—one that can feel harmonious, or deliberately disquieting. Observing how a spectator reacts to these seemingly simple visual setups is revealing; they frequently raise eyebrows because the way the subjects present themselves deviates sharply from societal expectations of 'the norm.' But the norm is entirely unstable, shifting fluidly depending on one's socio-cultural lineage. By placing individuals from disparate cultural realities into identical photographic conditions, the work functions as a live sociological experiment. The image reads entirely differently depending on the viewer's origin, forcing them to transcend their own boundaries of belonging. Ultimately, the tension shifts from the artwork itself to the viewer's defensive reaction, making them wonder why and how a Moroccan woman produced such an object in the first place.
Worldview, Geography, and Cultural Position
Relation to the world, digital culture, global circulation, postcolonial thought, and place
ELSEHERE: Your statement suggests that the internet makes a utopian idea of world society technically reachable, while at the same time trapping people inside increasingly precise cultural and ideological bubbles. What kind of world do you think we are actually living in now: connected, fragmented, manipulated, plural, or all of these at once?
Yasmine Laraqui: We are absolutely living in all of these states simultaneously. While it is undeniable that a significant portion of the global population is digitally linked, the lived reality of this 'globalized world' is profoundly uneven. For instance, when you look at the fact that vast regions of the African continent still lack consistent internet connectivity, it becomes clear that globalization remains an exclusionary narrative. We are deeply fragmented because internet infrastructures are highly regionalized. A user in China does not navigate the same internet architecture as someone in Morocco or the United States. Without a VPN, major portions of the global population are structurally locked out of accessing identical data streams, creating massive socio-political divisions.
This fragmentation is inherently manipulated. Sovereign politics and corporate gatekeepers dictate what information is visible, what applications are permitted, and how regional markets expand. Living in Morocco offers a unique vantage point; we operate largely under a Western digital umbrella, meaning American platforms and infrastructures dominate our data landscape. Yet, the Chinese tech market is growing aggressively here, shifting consumer habits and local digital alignments. This brings us to the question of plurality. We navigate a hybrid space where a state might adopt Chinese hardware for its 5G networks while relying entirely on American ecosystems like Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its core data storage. True plurality, however, remains a myth because of these corporate monopolies. The ideological bubbles we inhabit are not organic cultural formations; they are deliberate, algorithmic architectures engineered by centralized tech monopolies that systematically dismantle actual cultural plurality to keep users trapped inside predictive loops
ELSEHERE: You have spoken about wanting to remap North–South and East–West culture shock. What do those coordinates still reveal to you, and where do you feel they now fail?
Yasmine Laraqui: Looking back, that was certainly an ambitious intellectual horizon, formulated during my thesis research. Today, I see that these coordinates are naturally remapping themselves through the currents of globalization. The traditional North–South axis remains deeply relevant as an index of economic disparity and material reality. The 'Global South' still accurately describes emerging nations that lack a high GDP and cannot afford to transition into a leisure-oriented society in the way Western nations can . In these environments, conversations about how artificial intelligence will alter the workforce feel deeply abstracted, simply because the local economy relies so heavily on informal labor.
Conversely, the traditional East–West culture shock feels increasingly mythical—a ideological construct inherited from the Cold War era and earlier geopolitical conflicts. This artificial binary fails because human psychological traits, ambitions, and desires for self-determination are not neatly confined by regional or geographic setups. The democratization of information has revealed that underlying human patterns transcend physical latitudes. Whether one is positioned in the Global South, North, or East, the fundamental human drive to construct a viable, secure life remains uniform. The old geopolitical coordinates fail because they force us to believe in immutable, essentialist differences between peoples. They are rigid ideological models that fail to capture the fluid, shared psychology of our hyper-connected reality.
ELSEHERE: Being based in Casablanca seems important to your thinking, not only geographically but strategically and symbolically. What does it mean to you to build from Casablanca now, rather than simply exhibiting outward from it?
Yasmine Laraqui: Symbolically, Casablanca embodies the very intersection of the North, South, East, and West. Positioned in North Africa, it directly faces Southern Europe, while 'Morocco' in Arabic—Al-Maghrib—literally signifies the place where the sun sets: the West. It is all of these coordinates at once. After spending several formative years living and working between Paris and New York, returning to settle in Casablanca felt like an operational necessity rather than a passive choice.
It is always simpler to insert oneself into a mature, pre-existing art market where the infrastructure is already fully functional. But operating in an environment where everything has yet to be built provides a completely different kind of fulfillment. Morocco is an extraordinary, fertile territory across multiple creative and commercial industries, and it would be a missed historical opportunity not to actively participate in building those ecosystems here. While we inherit a profound legacy from pioneers like the Casablanca School who paved the way before us, our current responsibility is to make this momentum sustainable. Morocco is globally revered for its ancestral craftsmanship and material heritage, but we must simultaneously establish a robust, formalized domestic market for contemporary art. Building from Casablanca means planting permanent roots. It means choosing to be part of an active construction site, laying down the physical bricks of our own cultural infrastructure while looking out at the ocean.
Writing, Fiction, and Speculative Imagination
Writing as practice, speculative fiction, and the movement between narrative and image
ELSEHERE: Alongside your visual work, you are writing speculative fiction, including MENTAL and IMMERSIONS. What becomes possible in fiction that your visual practice cannot fully hold on its own?
Yasmine Laraqui: My thoughts. Writing is very precise. Talking is more of a grammatically incorrect flow that AI doesn’t like much. I do talk a lot in my writings, if that makes any sense. You cannot, uh, lie, or you cannot let people interpret the will still if you're writing poetry or if you're going through something that is, somehow second degree or things like that. But, you put your thoughts on paper. And it's true that you have to do that as a visual artist as well. Write a statement, do this, 'cause we have been through academia once again. And what we have to remember is that most of the artists who are self-made are not going through this practice of writing a statement or writing, you know, an explanation for all of their artworks. And sometimes I do work like that myself. I forget the fact that I have a master's degree, and I just go on to practice my art just to practice some art, you know.
As far as the writings are concerned, they're very strict, but absolutely not serious. They're very precise, but the process is completely anarchic.I build metaphors sometimes, but not trying to, uh, let the reader wonder. So I guess that's the difference. And also once they start reading, there is more content into it than a single piece. There is more content in it. And sometimes when your head is too full, you just need to put these thoughts on paper, need to have people following your thoughts, and need people to follow your philosophy as well.
So I would say my visual work is way more superficial even if it's profound because it is superficial.
But writing gives me the space to expand, to create a world and to expand it, and to somehow invite the reader to become a philosopher himself.
ELSEHERE: Do you think speculative narrative allows you to push your critique of technology, power, and emotional capture further than visual work does, or does it serve a different kind of inquiry altogether?
Yasmine Laraqui: I do think speculative narrative allows me to push my critique a little further than visual work does. But it is just the beginning. Like, ideally, I would make a movie out of it. So yes and no. I would say that for now, I haven't created the visual work that goes with it, but that it's not excluded. And maybe the final form of these books are actually movies. So I am thinking about it. Of course, it needs a certain kind of budget. It needs a certain kind of sponsorship.
And it needs, for it to, to really take the time and work on it. Because it's sci-fi again. You don't want something, uh, that wouldn't be realistic or just, you know, very, uh, art studio kind of sci-fi. You see what I mean? But to answer your question, I do believe that the final form of these are movies, so they would be visual works themselves.
About Yasmine Laraqui
As a dedicated cultural entrepreneur, Yasmine Laraqui focuses on anchoring emerging regional contemporary art ecosystems into the global map. Following years working between Paris and New York,
she returned to Morocco to build sustainable creative infrastructures. She is the founder of LY Connects and operates the Yasmine Laraqui Studio & Casablanca Residency, a localized production and research node that fosters international dialogue and media creation—including dedicated podcast and video broadcast setups—directly within Casablanca’s unique cultural landscape. Laraqui holds a BFA from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts Paris-Cergy (2012) and an MFA in Photo, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York (2014). Her visual art has been exhibited internationally, including at the Marrakech Biennale, Photo L.A., and Art Basel Miami Week. Expanding her conceptual critique of technology and emotional capture into literature, she is the author of a speculative fiction trilogy that includes the sci-fi novels Mental (2025) and Immersions (2026), texts she approaches as structural blueprints for a future cinematic language. She lives and works in Casablanca, Morocco.
Artist Statement
Although physical geographies seem to echo hostility, the utopian notion of world society has never been as technically reachable as it is through the digital. The internet has enabled a wider map of representations doubled with an instant way of accessing information. More importantly, the digital revolution made us aware of our contemporaries and their ideas, all around the world and in real-time. For the art world, the internet appears to be the perfect space for experimenting with borderlessness, multicultural appreciation, and finally, fully digital formats. Since everyone produces images, everyone produces information. Paradoxically, because of the accuracy of algorithm targeting, this supposedly widens the spectrum of diverse information and ends up looking like a comfortable bubble of pleasing and like-minded data sharers.
Forty years ago, Flusser wrote that we were entering a Post-historical and dimensionless era through and within which all our information would merge to form a “global brain”. This visionary statement raised sociological implications including mutational notions of cultures and the contemporary relevance of nationality within cyberspace worldwide. With an interest in new technologies and post-humanism, I delved into the limits of our digitalized identities and started thinking about the notion of intimacy on a global virtual stratum - that of an obsolete phenomenon in a post-capitalist world.
While my previous works were centered on identity politics, through staged photographs, immersive installations, performances, videos or the shows I curated, what I currently propose is a revival of methodic pragmatism. Bridging the pragmatic methodism to critical theories and esthetics research is what I am doing. While I am writing the third part of my saga, I opened my photo studio for commercial use and a small artists residency to get back to curating shows for internationals who desire to experience Casablanca and establish a dialogue with the local scene.
About Inside Out
Inside Out is ELSEHERE’s long-form conversation series, published through STRATUM. It begins from the belief that before artists are understood through category, institution, or medium, they must also be encountered through the deeper structures that shape a practice over time: memory, method, contradiction, relation, and the conditions of life pressing from within the work. This conversation with Yasmine Laraqui has been edited from her written responses for publication.
Edited by Yuyang Hu
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