Arts in Marrakech 2009

A modest salt border divides North Africa from southern Europe, prompting some adventurers to swim the short distance between the two continents. According to the Strait of Gibraltar Swimming Association, most long-distance swimmers attempt the crossing from the Spanish island of Tarifa, swimming an average of 20km (depending on currents) to Punta Cires on the Moroccan coastline. It is uncertain if Czech swimmer David Cech, one of only eight swimmers to have completed the full round-trip, had his passport in a Ziploc bag tucked under his Speedos. There is enough reason to.

A vast and expanding lack of reciprocity underpins the relationship between Africa and Europe. European newspapers are awash with stories about it, so too member states’ beaches. In recent years, a veritable tide of human flotsam has interrupted beach-going holidaymakers in the Canary Islands and elsewhere: setting off from ports as far away as Dakar, these fugitives from the residual world have come to dominate contemporary politics. This is now also true of art-making, as is evident from two striking contributions by Francis Alÿs and Isaac Julien to this year’s Arts in Marrakech festival.

Francis Alÿs, Don’t cross the bridge before you get to the river (2008–9)

Founded in 2005, AiM is the first major trilingual (English, Arabic and French) festival of its kind in North Africa. Offering a wide-ranging programme of literary discussions, film screenings and art events, this year’s third instalment included an ambitious biennial-style group exhibition that posed some difficult questions about the politics of human movement. Titled, somewhat abstrusely, ‘Proposal for Articulating Works and Places’, curator Abdellah Karroum’s thoughtfully conceived, if not always consistent exhibition included a new work by Alÿs. A clever synthesis of agitprop address and Situationist tomfoolery, Don’t cross the bridge before you get to the river (2008–9) presents viewers with two display cabinets containing press cuttings about African migration into Europe, collaged maps, drawings and artist writings, which function as a sort of informational preface his four projections (scenes filmed in Tarifa and Tangiers). Central to this mixed-media installation is the artist’s speculative proposal to build a bridge across the Gibraltar Strait using hundreds of boats. The Floating Bridge Project, as it is described in the information display, pits the imagination of the artist against the science of the engineer and dogma of the politician.

A devastatingly simple question frames this ephemeral project: ‘How can one at the same time promote global economy and limit the movement of people around the globe?’ Alÿs’ resonant projections – one pair shows crowds listlessly staring out across the Gibraltar Strait, the other lines of children with toy boats enacting the first steps of his proposal – lend this question a sense of existential despair. The seductive calm of Don’t cross the bridge before you get to the river, which will appear in the artist’s June 2010 Tate Modern retrospective, found an abrupt counterpoint in Adel Abdessemed’s five-minute video, The sea (2009). Installed nearby, this document of a performance shows the artist precariously balancing on a rudimentary wooden raft; as the waves jostle him, he attempts to scrawl the expression ‘politically correct’ onto the raft’s surface. It is a nice enough idea but dull in the execution.

Tomas Colaço, Pension Palace – Room 11 (2009)

Other notable contributions to Karroum’s exhibition, which privileged conceptually attuned practices in posing its politico-aesthetic arguments, included Tomas Colaço’s Pension Palace – Room 11 (2009), a set recreating a fictional author’s room in Tangiers. The work included a large-scale painted backdrop depicting a view of the Gibraltar Strait.

Loredana Longo, stills from the ‘Exposion’ series

Loredana Longo’s ongoing ‘Explosion’ series is an arresting document of an increasingly complex series of still-life scenes being exploded and then recomposed. The expatriate Nigerian Otobong Nkanga presented a new work in progress piece. Titled Contained measures of tangible memories (2009) and displayed in a courtyard of the host venue, a late-19th-century Marrakechi palace, the work features two duplicate mobile plinths on top of which the artist has placed five bowls containing mica, black soap, cassia fistula, indigo dye and alum. Although familiar with these natural elements, the artist was intrigued by their differing usage in Morocco. The outcome is a simple yet engagingly cryptic staging of difference.

Otobong Nkanga, Contained measures of tangible memories (2009)

AiM included a number of ancillary art projects, amongst them a manifestation of artists Giles Round and Mark Aerial Waller’s Taverna Especial (2009), a kind of nomadic cultural kitchen which in Marrakech included an offering of lamb shoulder confit, prepared by Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire, a mint-flavoured gin cocktail and an immersive sound environment created by Moroccan artist Younes Baba-Ali. The lack of choice defining the offering was the key the curatorial concept. The project, hosted in the plush town house, Kssour Agafay, seemed to play well with AiM’s large contingent of ‘rich hippies’, a not entirely misapplied description that was originally used by The Guardian to characterize Marrakechi notable, Yves Saint Laurent’s fly-in, fly-out guest-list.

Giles Round and Mark Aerial Waller, Taverna Especial (2009)

Food, as well as the vagaries of growing plants in a dry Mediterranean climate, underpinned Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada’s slight but undeniably charming offering: an informal picnic at a nursery on the outskirts of Marrakech. Palm Project (2009), as the event was described in a large hand-out circulated during the preview week, is an extension of a project showcased on the 2007 Venice Biennale and principally concerns itself with the making and marketing of contemporary Morocco. This necessarily means the precarious state of the country’s botanical landscape, particularly as luxury golf estates have come to define the country’s attraction to visiting Europeans who prefer jacquard jerseys to kaftans.

Barrada’s hand-out also included a visual taxonomy of palm trees, as well as a pink A4 sheet of paper containing a ‘modest proposal to modernise Morocco and maximise its resources and efficiency’. Written in English and Arabic, it contained the suggestion that Morocco join the European Union, ‘and on the first day of membership, all persons on Moroccan soil not possessing a European passport, visa or tourist card will be deemed illegal and […] be immediately deported.’ A bit of investigation revealed that its signatory, Yahya Sari, is a fiction. His name translates as ‘Jonathan Swift’, or thereabouts.

Isaac Julien, WESTERN UNION: Small Boats (2007)

Isaac Julien’s WESTERN UNION: Small Boats (2007) similarly occupied itself with the salt borders of prejudice. Shown as a three-screen projection in the bare concrete interiors of the never finished Théâtre Royal, the film employs metaphor and ellipsis to tell the story of a fictional boat journey from Africa to Europe. In part a conversation with director Luchino Visconti’s Sicilian landscapes, the film also challenges what Julien once described as the ‘stereotypical mode of exploring these questions of migration’. An operatic imagination of the bare life, WESTERN UNION: Small Boats’ occasional lapses into baroque pageantry (especially towards the end) are counterbalanced by the artist’s fine sense of mise en scène (particularly the Italian beach scene and documentary study of a ‘graveyard’ filled with boats used by African migrants to reach Europe). The Mediterranean, which can seem languid and idyllic in films, assumes a far more sinister, even fatal sensibility here. It is a fatality many of the artists invited to AiM grappled with.