SLARG researcher Joachim Ben Yakoub contributes to Assemblies through a research-based text developed within his work as SLARG researcher. His contribution reflects on the legacy of Ahl El Hijra, a Moroccan collective active in 1980s Schaerbeek, and examines how printed matter, images, and ephemeral cultural production function as carriers of collective memory. Rather than treating these materials as fixed historical documents, his contribution approaches them as reactivated traces that connect past struggles to present forms of urban and cultural life in Brussels.

Trigger #6: Assemblies
Guest edited by Taous Dahmani, Trigger #6: Assemblies starts from a simple but urgent premise: “life is politics, and politics is life.” From there, it explores how collectivity takes shape under conditions of fragmentation, diaspora, and precarious existence.

Rather than focusing on the spectacular or the event-driven, Assemblies turns toward what holds things together underneath: the infrastructures of coming together. From cafés and reading groups to living rooms, tents, and bookshops, “assemblies” here are understood as everyday, often invisible forms of collective agency.

Trigger #6: Assemblies is a collaboration between FOMU – Museum of Photography Antwerp and Fw:books, Cover design: Hans Gremmen.