Mounir Ayache

My project for Villa Albertine is a research-creation journey around what I call “myth engines”: the systems that produce large-scale stories today–US entertainment industries, AI-driven creative tools and the space program. I want to bring these myth engines into dialogue with myths, archives and cosmologies from the Maghreb, West Africa and the Arab world, and see how they can host new speculative futures when activated from my position between France and Morocco.

My work already starts from concrete places and archives in North and West Africa–archaeological sites, UNESCO-scanned cities, oral histories–which I transform into future worlds through game engines and moving image. The residency would extend this approach by observing from within how American narratives about history, race, territory and the future are constructed, and by reusing their narrative grammars for other protagonists, geographies and timelines.

Concretely, I plan to develop a constellation of small “myth engine prototypes” rather than a single finished piece. These prototypes will take the form of short real-time scenes in a game engine, sketches for immersive installations and narrative blueprints. Each will connect one or more American contexts (cinema and series, AI ecosystems, space imaginaries) with specific stories, landscapes or archives drawn from the Maghreb and West Africa.

The aim is to return from the residency with documented prototypes, texts and visual materials that will feed several projects: new installations, a game-based work and hybrid formats between exhibition and performance, forming the next chapter of my long-term research.

The United States is essential to do this project because many of the myth engines I work with are structurally based there. I am particularly interested in three regions that reflect different layers of this system: Southern California’s entertainment ecosystem, the San Francisco Bay Area’s AI and tech infrastructures, and the space-related institutions around Houston.

In Los Angeles, I want to be close to the factory of contemporary myths: film and TV production, writers’ rooms, game and VFX studios, and virtual production stages using LED walls and real-time environments. I am interested in how histories and racialised geographies are translated into genres, characters and visual clichés, and I hope to meet writers, narrative designers, artists and researchers who reflect on these questions from within and around the industry.

In the Bay Area, the focus shifts to AI systems, creative software and research labs that now shape how images, texts and worlds are generated. AI is already part of my practice; spending time there would allow me to speak with engineers, artists and scholars about how these tools transform writing, world-building and the handling of archives, and how these transformations resonate with sensitive materials from North and West Africa.

Around Houston, my interest lies in the narratives of the space program and their links to frontier mythology and national identity. I would like to confront these narratives with North African and Sahelian cosmologies and with my own family history connected to the Hermès spaceplane project, in dialogue with curators, historians of science and artists working with aerospace archives.