Telephone Books records a kind of coded language: the drawings and tally marks which Z.A.B (the artist’s grandmother) used to record family telephone numbers, as she could not read or write. Z.A.B. gave birth to twelve children, of whom ten lived. To keep in touch with them all, she made herself a telephone directory from an old recipe notebook.

To identify each family member, she made a coded drawing: the one with spectacles, the one with four sons. The corresponding telephone numbers were recorded as a series of little lines, which today recalls the ones and zeroes of computer binary language. In some cases, she had someone else write the name as well.

Like much of the Yto Barrada’s work, Telephone Books documents intimate and family histories against the backdrop of official, hegemonic, and colonial narratives and histories. Much of Barrada’s work focusses on microhistories and autonomous agency within a political landscape—often taking up colonial legacies between France and North Africa, revisiting ethnographic documents, interrogating the systems and languages of science, and exploring identity, economics, and notions of authenticity.