Film screening and artist talk with Hamza Halloubi

'Its throat is parched with thirst, but it would not accept a single drop of water from alien hands'

19.03

M Leuven

'Its throat is parched with thirst, but it would not accept a single drop of water from alien hands', Hamza Halloubi, 2025

What if Mehdi Ben Barka, the Moroccan revolutionary and co-founder of the Tricontinental who disappeared in Paris in 1965, were buried beneath the Fondation Louis Vuitton? The film 'Its throat is parched with thirst, but it would not accept a single drop of water from alien hands' (2025) by artist Hamza Halloubi takes this speculative idea as its starting point. During this 'Food for thought' evening, we will show this recent film (9:32 minutes).

Afterwards, artist Hamza Halloubi and Phillip Van den Bossche, curator and coordinator of visual arts at Moussem, will dive deeper into the work and Halloubi’s broader practice, with attention to memory, technology, political legacy, and the ways in which images continue to haunt the present.

About 'Its throat is parched with thirst, but it would not accept a single drop of water from alien hands' (2025)

Artist Hamza Halloubi is drawn to the idea that a figure from global revolutionary history might rest beneath a postmodern icon of late-capitalist glory. In a two-channel 3D animation, he reconstructs Ben Barka as a ghostly presence wandering through the museum, continuing to haunt the present.

The work explicitly refers to Jacques Derrida's 'Spectres of Marx', in which Marxist ideas are not seen as a closed chapter of the past, but as a spectre that continues to question the present and evokes a justice that remains unfulfilled. In Halloubi's film, even without memory and generated by technology, Ben Barka remains driven by a moral and revolutionary force. He appears as a figure who refuses to disappear and continues to question the present day, against the backdrop of contemporary contexts of political violence.

‘Its throat is parched with thirst, but it would not accept a single drop of water from alien hands’ is a co-production by Moussem, Museum De Pont and M HKA, with the support of the Flemish Government.

About Hamza Halloubi

Hamza Halloubi is an artist, filmmaker and writer, born in Tangier and based in Brussels. In film, video and painting, he explores tensions between visibility and silence and questions dominant Western art and historiography. From what he himself calls “minor places of culture”, he invokes historical and cultural figures to disrupt established hierarchies. His work favours subtle gestures over the spectacular and approaches filmmaking as an ambiguous act: simultaneously powerful and vulnerable, often imbued with doubt.

Halloubi is currently a resident at Moussem, an international arts centre that focuses on the structural development of artists through residencies, production and presentation, contributing to a diverse and urban arts landscape.

His work'Studio Visit' (2016) was previously shown at M during the collection presentation 'The Constant Glitch' in 2021 and was subsequently acquired by the city of Leuven.