‘Is social integration all it’s cracked up to be?’

The Showroom, in partnership with Verso Books, invites French writer Louisa Yousfi to speak with artist Nassim Azarzar on the occasion of the UK launch of her book, In Defence of Barbarism published by Verso. 

Originally published in French, Rester Barbare has been a key inspiration for Azarzar’s artistic practice. Here he talks to Yousfi about their shared experience of living in France as North African children of the diaspora and the pressures of blending in a society tainted by racism and colonial dynamics.

About the book
Taking inspiration from the leading Algerian writer Kateb Yacine (‘I’m better off not being too cultivated. I have to retain a certain barbarianism’), Yousfi’s provocative essay explores ways of resisting the cultural and moral hegemony of the French ‘Empire’.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that posits integration as an unalloyed good, Yousfi, shows how assimilation can equate to the loss of traditions, religion, language, and culture. Using a refreshingly wide range of cultural reference points, to construct her argument, she opens up the path of a decolonial cultural politics and an aesthetics of resistance.

This event is organised within the context of Nassim Azarzar’s mural commission Hayat al Noujoum / La vie des étoiles exhibited on the exterior of The Showroom until Summer 2025.

Louisa Yousfi (1988, France) is a journalist and literary critic. She is the author of Rester Barbare (La Fabrique, 2022), a work in which she takes up the motif of ‘barbarism’ borrowed from the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine, to offer both a political and literary account of the barbaric (re)becoming of Blacks and Arabs in France. More recently, she contributed to the collective work Contre la littérature politique (with Pierre Alferi, Nathalie Quintane, Leslie Kaplan, Tanguy Viel and Volodine, La Fabrique), 2024.

Nassim Azarzar (1989, France) derives his painterly language from uniquely Moroccan imagery, transposing its forms and interrogating its meanings across contexts. This research has led to the creation of his visual language, reflecting the complexity of defining his identity as a person born in France to Moroccan parents. Nassim’s aesthetic exploration encompasses decorative arts, painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic design, and experimental cinema.