The Classroom
Hicham Benohoud
Loose Joints
170 x 230 mm, 144 pages, 76 monotone plates
Section-sewn quarterbound hardcover with buckram debossed spine and trimmed edges
Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon
Designed by Loose Joints Studio with an excerpt from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish
Scans and file preparation by LSD, Paris
LJ210, March 2025
ISBN 978-1-912719-65-5
From Loose Joints: The Classroom explores control and discipline within post-colonial Moroccan identity through staged, uncanny classroom images created between 1994 and 2002.
Frustrated by Morocco’s rigid educational system of the 1990s, art teacher Hicham Benohoud used photography as a pedagogical tool, creating a makeshift darkroom in his classroom to foster collaborative and hands-on learning, encouraging students to engage with creativity and identity.
The resulting images created with his students are marked by tension and alienation, blending absurdity, humour, and unease in their exquisitely framed and obliquely disarming compositions. In juxtaposing the monotony of the classroom with a visual exploration of both freedom and control, The Classroom builds a playful and existential critique of postcolonial identity, where childlike creative gestures merge into a more ambiguous aesthetic that hints at oppression, violence and isolation.
This new publication by Loose Joints draws from the artist's original archive of negatives from the time, building the first comprehensive appraisal of Benohoud’s ground-breaking series while highlighting the modern relevance of the work in its engagement with performance, politics, pedagogy and the body decades ahead of its time.
