You spend a year planning an art festival in a 16th century
ruin. You invite artists, distribute press releases, appear on panels in
Switzerland and Italy, host parties in London, Berlin and Morocco, and
begin to edit a book about site-specific exhibition making that will
focus on the particular historical identity of your venue.
You decide that the show won’t be a roll call of over-exposed Western
art stars but, instead, the best of your own generation alongside
leading voices from the African continent. As a strategic hedge, you
secure the participation of an artist so well known that the whole
enterprise will be spit-polished by her in-demand gravitas. With her on
board the lesser knowns are plainly signs of intention and no symptom of
your lack of star-catching power.
You tour the venue and pinch yourself. It is more fantastic than the
Arsenale in Venice, boasting crumbling mud walls whose high turrets are
crowned with stork’s nests – great piles of sticks, each containing an
alien creature clicking its beak in a kind of primeval music. The dream
setting for the chance of a curatorial lifetime.
You decide that all forty artists need to visit the space before they
even think about what to make. At great expense they are flown in from
every corner of the globe. The proposals start to arrive, each more
ambitious and than the last. Never mind the fact that the total budget
for the exhibition is exceedingly modest for a project of such ambition.
This is Morocco. Things are cheap and magic is the order of business.
A bomb rips through the heart of Marrakech. The Argana café in the
city’s main square, Djemma el-Fna, is obliterated. Seventeen people are
killed and twenty injured. Radical Islamists from up the coast at Safi.
Just a one-off, according to wishful local commentary, not evidence that
the country is sliding towards chaos like its neighbors. Even so, you
write to reassure your artists, hoping they won’t pull out. None do
except one: your star turn – citing the intensification of ongoing
professional commitments. But the show must go on.
During the following months hotel owners report a nosedive in bookings.
This must have been the attackers’ intent. All the more reason for the
project to continue. After all, the biennale was started as an attempt
to build bridges between the Islamic world and the West in the paranoid
midst of the Bush years. As an international cultural initiative, your
project feels more relevant than ever.
How lucky you are to have your exhibition site. Or, at least, to have
been told that numerous informal assurances – from princesses,
ambassadors and flunkies – have been given to your colleagues confirming
the prompt issue of official permission. With only a little doubt you
raise the matter intermittently with the biennale team, who continually
report warm dialogue with authorities. “But we really need concrete
permission”, you repeat with six months to go. “You have to know”, one
colleague replies, “that in Morocco everything is possible but nothing
is certain”. With folk wisdom like that in hand you push on.
Three months later and instead of permission your colleagues receive a
letter stating, unequivocally, that the venue is not available. A
sickening faint. There is an election in a week’s time and the
political landscape is uncertain, with reverberations from the Arab
Spring gaining momentum. Odds are, the apparatchik who signed the letter
will be out on his ear in ten days. His replacement won’t arrive for
another month and that is too long to wait for a reversal. More nausea:
Without a physical venue, you worry, there will be nothing specific
about your ‘site-specific’ exhibition.
‘We’re building a bridge above a yawning void’ is how Werner Herzog described the process of making Fitzcaraldo.
Hubris. You look at a publicity photo of yourself taken at the Palais
Badia, wearing a white Jellaba covered in multi-coloured polka dots that
you had intended as a knowing riff on Damien Hirst. Behind your vain
figure is a wall built six centuries before you were born; a wall that
will be standing after you have finished swanning around Marrakech and
this life too.
In a panic, you telephone one of the board members – a local architect –
and ask him to take you to any sites that he can secure through private
contacts. By the time he picks you up the sun is waning and a desert
chill creeping in. He mentions the Cisterns of the Grand Koutoubia
Mosque in the centre of the Medina. He was responsible for restoring
them and they looked great in a photo you remember – long brick tunnels,
dramatically lit. You recall how you tried to gain permission to access
to them previously, during a meeting in the bare office of the Director
of Historical Monuments – set within a down at heel government
building. At the time he told you that it was impossible to enter them
without higher permission, from the Minister of Culture in Rabat – a man
he didn’t know, yet, as he had only been in his job for twenty minute
prior to your arrival. Now, standing outside the Koutoubia, you see it
was just a bluff. You can walk right into the Cisterns through a steel
gate that has been ripped from its hinges by determined vagrants, keen
to use the tunnels for shelter. As you descend the stairs you step over
numerous piles of human feces. In the tunnel, pitch black, a stink
indicates that there is more of the same to discover. With only light
from your mobile phone to guide the way you walk further into the dark,
trying to picture all your pending artworks for the Badi Palace
installed in this depressing space. The roof is lower than you’d like.
Now you have left the subterranean path and are screaming down the
Ourika Road in the direction of the Atlas Mountains in the architect’s
black Range Rover. Some kilometers down, he pulls up alongside the
concrete shell of a luxury hotel complex. Nothing but skeleton, missing
windows and surfaces. It will probably never be anything more than the
developer’s speculative failing. The architect knows the owner and
thinks that we can probably get permission to use it. Night has fallen
and there is no one guarding the buildings behind the corrugated tin
fence so, at once, in fit of desperation, you ask him to give you a
boost.
In a few seconds you are over the wall and climbing up rough-hewn
concrete stairs in the dark, exploring the carcass of a half-realized
vision. You worry that you might encounter squatters. After a few
stumbles and minutes of poking around you ascend to the roof. From there
you look out directly upon the Marrakech race track – built to the spec
of the international Formula One circuit but only ever utilized once to
that effect. Another mirage.
The architect has one more place to show you – it’s a factory just
outside town by the railway station. You drive the underlit streets,
making wrong turns. It seems he can’t remember quite where it is. You
stop at the traffic lights and about thirty seconds later feel a loud
thump. One of the city’s countless moped riders has ploughed straight
into the back of your stationary vehicle. His bike has lost more than a
bit of fuselage but the idiot driver is fine. The architect gets out to
inspect the damage – one rear light smashed. Neither of them exchange
any worlds and the moped rider, looking only a little bit sheepish and
with what seems like the architect’s tacit consent, takes off into the
night. There was no way he had insurance.