Iconic Renault 12: Exhibit Honors North African Migrants’ Journey Home at Marseille Museum

Since September 29, French-Moroccan director and filmmaker Mohamed El Khatib, the artist in residence for 2023 at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MUCEM), is paying tribute to the generation of his father who "criss-crossed the roads of France to Spain then Morocco and Algeria on board overloaded Renault 12 vehicles" during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s without GPS or air conditioning, reports Africanews. "Here, at the Mucem, we have installed about ten cars, mainly Renault 12 and 504, the two legendary cars of the Mediterranean epics. That is to say that in the 70s and 80s, they were the cars of the return to the homeland, and what I was able to observe, after meeting about a hundred Marseille residents, is that the return to the homeland is part of the national heritage," he explains.

According to El Khatib, these cars "carry tenderness and are almost engines of emotion. Because they are immediately imbued with another time, another place, rather joyful moreover." "These cars are a bit like Proust’s madeleines. These are childhood memories. And as soon as you put one in the museum, people really come to tell you their stories and share their stories, so these are cars with stories," says the author of the "Renault 12" exhibition.

Marseille photographer Yohanne Lamoulère is participating in the exhibition. She highlights large-format shots mixed with vintage photos collected from residents that reconstruct this "little-explored part of history." "For me, these are happy memories, because I see my father working ten months a year and all of a sudden, there was something festive and we had the feeling of being part of a collective history. And I remember, as soon as we took the highway, people we didn’t know, but because they were loaded like us, the cars honked and all of a sudden we were part of a story," says El Khatib. The "Renault 12" exhibition will last a month.