What are biennales for? Another contributor to this volume has outlined
historic national governmental and diplomatic motivations for
establishing events of this kind. The efficacy of such undertakings as
prestige enhancing, tourist enticing strategies is also understood by
many politicians worldwide, and the profusion of biennales and
triennales – more than two hundred and counting – provides the proof.
Given this large field, it is worth commenting on the operational
conditions that underpin the Marrakech Biennale. Such observations
contextualize its fourth edition, both in terms of the festival’s
institutional development and its visual artistic program for 2012.
Unlike the only other biennale to involve Morocco – the itinerant Arab
Art Biennale, staged in Rabat (just once) in 1976 – and almost all of
the international festivals mentioned in Antony Gardner’s article, the
Marrakech Biennale is an independent non-profit initiative. It was
founded in 2005 by Vanessa Branson, a British philanthropist and
businesswoman based in London and Marrakech, as a response to the frosty
relationship between the Islamic world and the ‘the West’ during George
W. Bush’s War on Terror. Branson intended the festival – then named the
Arts in Marrakech Biennale (AIM) – as a cultural bridge that would
bring international and Moroccan intellectuals together in dialogue. In
this first iteration a greater focus was placed on literature and film
than visual art. It was a small scale event, largely cloistered in
Branson’s riad, notwithstanding the exhibition of her Wonderful Fund
Collection at the – privately owned – Musée du Marrakech. At this
beginning stage, AIM was closer to a salon than a public festival.
The second AIM largely followed the same model, but with its art
component doubling in size to include both the photographic survey
exhibition 9 Perspectives from South Africa at the Musée du Marrakech – curated by Ross Douglas – and L’appartement 22 Rabat/Marrakech,
a survey of works in various media by contemporary Moroccan artists at
the L’Ecole Superieure des Arts Visuels (ESAV), selected by Abdellah
Kharroum. The latter would curate the ambitious main exhibition of the
next biennale in 2009, entitled A Proposal for Articulating Works and Places.
It is worth noting the relevance of one of this exhibition’s key
gambits, namely, its exploration of correspondence between continents
and different geographies, encapsulated in Francis Alÿs project “Don’t cross the bridge before you get to the river”
(2009) – which examined both physical and intangible borders between
Africa and Europe. Moving beyond traditional gallery-style presentation,
a Special Project also brought the biennale out of the museum into the
street: Julien Fisera and Laurent P. Berger’s Stories of Order & Disorder
was a successful community facing artwork that built on the Moroccan
storytelling tradition, deploying thirty bards – both professional and
amateur – and a fleet of fifteen petit-taxi drivers to regale
unsuspecting passengers and passers by.
Carson Chan and I were determined that the third biennale’s promising
inroads towards grassroots community engagement and its successful
artistic commissions for the public realm should be taken up and
extended through our own curatorial project. Moreover, as non
Moroccan/Maghreb art specialists we did not desire to produce a summary
of national or regional artistic practice. Much less, to apply the
reductive bracket of ‘authentic’ Moroccan identity fait accompli
to artists who may not agree with our designation. Given the preparation
time available, any attempt to achieve the first would have either
reiterated a stale status quo or advanced a woefully reduced snapshot of
local practice and intellectual agendas. In the second, the spectres of
ethnic essentialism and marketing expediency would have rendered such
an approach unhelpful. Hence, we invited a broad selection of
international artists to envisage how the particular physical and
cultural context of an exhibition in Marrakech might feature within a
macro circuit or transcendent condition. The results were surprising and
exhilarating, all the more so because they combined sophistication with
successful strategies for communicating to a wide audience from
disparate backgrounds.
Higher Atlas
The exhibition was to be called Higher Atlas. High connotes
reverie and transcendence. ‘Higher Atlas’ suggests a cartography of the
beyond. The title of the main exhibition of the 4th Marrakech Biennale
also refers to the local geography – the Atlas Mountains, which are
visible from the venue. In this respect the site is the starting point
or ‘ground’ for a series of trips, both virtual and physical. The key
theme is that other worlds begin where one is standing; beyonds are
closer that one might think. This thesis is explored through
site-specific interventions by international contemporary artists,
architects, a composer and a writer. In so doing, a complex experience
of site emerges from the particularity of the venue, encompassing a
nexus of local and global conditions. The exhibition created numerous
vantage points, making strange the ground beneath one’s feet. Amongst
the proposals we received, some moods emerged – shifts in scale from
small to large and vice versa, from surface to depth, from ground to
figure, inversions and parallax; passages from social to mystical and
the other way round.
Carson and I imagined an exhibition whose elements would be completely
conceived in response to the site and physically produced in Marrakech.
In this way, we hoped, the biennale could further satisfy its mission to
produce international cultural bridges through an exhibition project
while avoiding the pitfall of context-blind importation of content. In
pursuing this agenda we were keen to manage the participation of foreign
artists so that they would not merely play the role of tourists –
bringing with them precious material baggage in the form of art objects.
Instead, they would have to undertake two residency periods – during
both the research stage of their work and its production. Nevertheless,
we were aware that this strategy would not, by itself, avoid
demonstrating the ‘nomadic principle’ which Miwon Kwon has identified as
a defining condition of capital and power in our times. The freedom
that would allow many of our artists to produce ‘site-specific’ projects
is unequally distributed among creative professionals with different
passports. Recognizing this critical appraisal of the relationship
between the travelling cultural worker and a global status quo, we
sought to avoid commissioning works that might valorize exotic changes
of scenery – benign displacement – enjoyed by frequent-flyers and those
proffering dubious notions of cultural ‘hybridity’. Such shibboleths
are, as Johnathan Friedman has observed, a well-known posture in the
contemporary artworld:
In the work of the post-colonial border-crossers, it is
always the poet, the artist, the intellectual, who sustains the
displacement and objectifies it in the printed word. But who reads the
poetry, and what are the other kinds of identification occurring in the
lower reaches of social reality? […] The global, culturally hybrid,
elite sphere is occupied by individuals who share a very different kind
of experience of the world’.
On a more concrete level, we initiated series of structured interactions
between biennale artists and mentees from the Université Cadi Ayyad–
the latter tasked with playing key roles in the production of the
former’s works. Each of the practitioners were paired with students –
most of whom, it was established during the application process, had
never left Morocco. These young persons were to help locate and
negotiate with artisans, communicating both artists’ visions and the
artisans’ proposed translations. Thus, the exhibition would not involve
outsourcing the fabrication of already complete designs but, instead,
constitute a platform for conversation between three demographics;
drawing mobile and less-mobile stakeholders into a shared dialogue in
order to produce new, consensual, realities. The biennale also extended
the creative space to workshops with primary school children and young
orphans, led by biennale artists.
Within the spectrum of contemporary artistic practice attention to a
‘site’ does not need to be limited to demonstrating how the physical
elements of an actual location can formally condition art objects. While
actively encouraging works in this vein, the main exhibition is also
informed by recent approaches that revel in a semantic slippage between
content and place – which proffer ‘multiple definitions of the site,
[that] in the end find their “locational” anchor in the discursive’.
This is a method that deems ‘cultural debates, a theoretical concept, a
social issue, a political problem, an institutional framework […] a
community or seasonal event, a historical condition, even particular
formations of desire’ as sites. According to this understanding, for the
biennale to be a fruitful investigation of ‘site’ our project would
have to contend with narratives and ideologies as much as material
exigencies.
Beyond artist’s projects engaging with the discursive vectors outlined
above, and the workshops with varied stakeholders, it was clear that a
research focus on the history, problematics and possibilities for
exhibition making in the city and – more generally – Morocco was called
for. In attempting to understand these issues during our early
preparation we were struck by the lack of written information available.
Dedicated public archives do not exist and foreign resources are rather
limited. The existing scholarship – such as Katarzyna Pieprzak’s Imagined Museums
– was most useful in outlining the dearth of non-profit institutional
support for contemporary artistic production, exhibition and discussion
within Morocco – to say nothing of the awkward and frequently
orientalizing parameters by which expatriate Moroccans find visibility
abroad. Consequently, we have attempted provide a platform for the
exchange of historical and methodological knowledge – which we have
pursued through this publication – as opposed to a basic catalogue – and
the Marrakech Biennale/Dar Al Mam’un Conversations series.
It is worth re-emphasizing that the biennale not operated as if it were here to fill in a tabula rasa.
At least two generations of post-colonial artistic strategies exist and
are alluded to in this volume. However, perhaps the biennale’s most
serious task is to make a visible representation in contemporary
Moroccan cultural space for others to push back against. To the same
degree that the essays herein will be informative we expect them to be
disputed by Moroccan artists and other specialists. Let us hope that our
endeavor provokes at least as much as it pleases. To increase the
chances of this happening a bilingual publication was imperative. In
sum, our attempt to address ‘site’ in the broadest sense led us to a
critical re-fashioning of the purpose of the biennale as an organization
– and the wider social and intellectual engagement that has been
inaugurated by this process will continue in subsequent editions.
The Shifting Site
Before taking up our curatorial posts we were informed that the
exhibition venue would be the 16th century ruin of the El Badi Palace –
built by the Saadian Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, located in the medina. Its
immense complex of crumbing rooms, sunken gardens, reflecting pools,
pavilions and a dungeon seemed an unparalleled set of creative
opportunities. Discussions between the biennale and the authorities in
charge of the site had already taken place with positive results and the
former had been informed that timely submission of appropriate
documents to designated bureaucrats would seal the deal. However, with
just three months to go before the ‘site-specific’ exhibition – and
after all our artists had already conducted preliminary research trips –
we received an unequivocal letter from the Ministry of Culture
informing us that, due to renovation work, the palace would not be
available after all. Without a physical site, we asked ourselves, what
would be specific about our exhibition? So began the urgent process of
re-imagining each artist’s biennale project.
Under these circumstances, the biennale’s status vis a vis the public
life of a country undergoing great social change was an open question.
Some of the uncertain conditions that shaped this edition of the
biennale are hardly novel. The previous installment also suffered a
last minute change of venue. Originally set to take place at the Musée
du Marrakech, a disagreement between the two organizations necessitated a
move to the Palais Bahia – a beautifully state-owned 19th century
complex in the heart of the medina which was formerly the residence of
General Lyautey – head of the French colonial army in Morocco – before
its current role as one of the city’s key tourism sites. What Kharroum’s
exhibition lost in the field of planning through the venue change it
gained in the form of a wider audience. However, the Bahia did not come
without its own strict conditions, including a prohibition on affixing
objects such as framed photographs to walls and, as Holiday Powers has
noted, more poetic difficulties in the form stray cats making physical
alterations to an artwork that featured live goldfish. In Morocco – it
has been said – anything is possible but nothing is certain. Although we
bore this maxim in mind at the start of the Higher Atlas project
its sagacity would become more apparent. Not in terms of some kind of
ethno-cultural ‘truth’ but, rather, as a summary of the biennale’s
potential in a state where public/museum spaces that can accommodate
contemporary artistic practices are exceedingly thin on the ground.
This uncertainty constituted a major site-specific condition to be
addressed on the administrative level. In order to intervene in the
chosen architectural space we had to engage the particularity of its
political nexus. As an independent organization founded by a
non-Moroccan, operating in a field unrecognized by government policy,
this was by no means straightforward. We had to work hard to discover
how/where power and permission to use the state-owned venue could be
exercised for us. In pursuing our agenda the original meaning of
the name Marrakech – ‘to cross and hide’ – seemed apropos. Moreover,
while chasing our goals the nascent uncertainties of the historical
moment in the form of the Arab Spring became an unexpected factor. While
we originally expected to locate ‘consent’ to use the Badi somewhere
within a spectrum of royal prerogative and national bureaucratic process
the dynamic emergence of democratic reforms, in public and private,
meant that we found ourselves pursuing a shifting target.
Our desire to be more civic facing, and reliance upon opaque national
bureaucracy to help facilitate this outreach, seemed to leave us with
few public options following the formal rejection of our application to
use the Badi. The alternatives available were mostly limited to numerous
resorts and private leisure facilities, such as golf courses, hotels
and restaurants; contexts whose economic and cultural circuits exclude
most Moroccans. But for a partnership with the MarocK Jeunes – a local
youth arts organization – who helped us to secure permission from the
Mayor of Marrakech to use the Theatre Royal, the biennale might have
retreated into the gilded cocoon of the tourism industry. Instead,
however, the new collaboration, venue and interaction with local
authorities has further integrated the biennale within the city of
Marrakech. It has also situated our project within the devolution of
power from national to municipal structures that has emerged in the wake
of the significant November elections.
(Web)site Specificity
Despite the change of location, it was clear that some of our key
curatorial concerns remained valid. A fundamental question, whose answer
problematizes fixed conceptions of site and, consequently, identity,
remained relevant: Namely – What is a threshold today? The
question is difficult: physical and virtual walls are penetrated – other
content pours in through fissures. Our distributed network technologies
effect a layering or compression of spatial, temporal and cultural
relationships, the production of knots which incorporate physical and
virtual sitehoods, locality and globality. As the philosophers Galloway
and Thacker have it
‘[i]nside the dense web of distributed networks, it would appear that everything is everywhere
– [there is] little room between the poles of the global and the local.
Biological viruses are transferred via airlines between Guandong
Province and Toronto in a manner of hours, and computer viruses are
transferred via data lines from Seattle to Saigon in a manner of
seconds’.
Thus, the notion of a threshold allows us to delineate particular nodes
within a network but not necessarily the spectrum of content that passes
through them – or, put otherwise, links to other nodes. With a little
attention, differences in physical/spatial site are revealed in their
subordination to the planetary dimensions of business, finance, trade
and information flows; set within a continuous net.
Higher Atlas stages the Theatre Royal as a junction. The various
interventions on-site, about site, around and above it map an expanded
field of ‘location’ – they are a series of connections to a node,
shooting off in multiple directions towards other spaces, both physical
and virtual. In this respect the exhibition is conceived in a manner
antithetical to the widespread ‘white cube’ staging techniques of many
Western galleries and museums. It performs sitehood as a point in a constellation,
figuring the theatre as a super-node in a multi-dimensional web of
connected physical and discursive locations. Thusly, the works in the
show textualize space and spatialize discourse. The artworks in the Higher Atlas flip the viewers perceptions, so visitors can consider sitehood (and cultural identity) as a series of connections.
One way to understand the above is through recourse to Gestalt psychology’s interest in the conscious negotiation of figure and ground.
Together, these concepts make up the totality of what is perceivable. A
general characteristic of our treatment of this totality is that visual
scenes involve attending to the figure and not the (back)ground. Put
otherwise, it is the figure on which perception is focused – it appears
structured while the ground is undifferentiated. This tendency is
highlighted by the well-known reversible/double images of
Toulouse-Lautrec’s Old Woman/Young Woman drawing and the more ubiquitous black and white Vase/Faces.
In each example, to ‘see’ one of the two inherent percepts involves the
other receding. Viewing both requires a kind of intentional switching
back and forth – toggling – whereby ground flips into figure and vice
versa. The relevance of this phenomenon is not limited to such drawings.
Indeed, McLuhan used the concept to discuss the ‘satisfactions’ and
‘dissatisfactions’ of technology. In a related manner, this exhibition
re-figures the Theatre: it is a mapping or figuring of the area of
inattention which surrounds and subtends the stage. The
knotted/networked ground ceases being a generic condition and is instead
brought into focus, given various structures/forms through artists’
works.
Higher Atlas constitutes a series of explorations of the
figure/ground nexus as it pertains to a particular node in our planetary
and informatic networks. It is a series of mapping exercises that
engender ‘recognition of things that were already present although not
central to the culture’s perception of itself’. Though – frequently –
background, these things are never a passive container but, instead, an
active part of reality. This curatorial rubric proceeds according to the
following insight by Peter Lunenfeld:
Being able to flip between ground and figure is central
to everyone’s use of the culture machine. What we all […] need is a
catalog of strategies to help us understand what we download and
contribute to what we upload. The ways that we figure words, sounds,
images, and objects from the ground of information will define how and
what we are able to produce with the culture machine.
We need an art that takes into account global networks/ground in a
manner that goes beyond the kind of disenchanted postmodern impasse
asserted by Baudrillard in Simulations – the image of a map of
such detail that it comes to cover the whole earth, obscuring more than
it reveals. We need artists whose work updates the conception of
mathematical sublimity for the magnitudes of the information age –
projects that act as catalysts for the viewer’s apprehension of almost
limitless information, inhuman speed and exponentially increasing space
as an expanded field of moral/practical competence and interpersonal
cooperation.
Needless to say, the totality is both Moroccan and global. Our
hope is that the artist’s works will begin to expose the mutable
contours of placehood in an empowering way. This is not a case of
neo-colonial overturning of authentic and previously unthreatened
‘Moroccan’ values on the part of the exhibition’s (foreign) curators and
artists. Not least, because alleged corruption of tradition can easily
be employed in defense of an ossified political status quo. Moreover, as
Abdellah Laroui notes, ‘the disavowal of Western culture cannot in
itself constitute culture’. To repudiate it in preference for indigenous
traditions – of putative pre-colonial provenence – is an essentialist,
Arabocentric approach that relies on dubious myths of origin. Just as
elsewhere in the world, many seemingly indigenous traditions are in fact
diasporic cultural constructs and hybrid phenomena when viewed
according to the perspective/ground of the long duree. Note, for
instance, the fact that the El Badi Palace was built by Portruguese
slaves, that it was formerly clad in Italian marble from Carerra and
that its design is informed by the Alhambrah in what is now Spain. In
relation to the last of these points, the historical conditions
referenced by the designation ‘post-colonial’ are here of the reverse
order, with Southern Spain (Al-Andalus) only attaining independence from
Moorish control in the fifteenth century.
Given these considerations, our commissioning for Higher Atlas is
not concerned with establishing a kind of product differentiation for
Marrakech – highlighting the city as a unique location within the global
tourism market. A classic strategy in this respect would be the
production of Orientalist and self-orientalizing images, obscuring the
unfinished project of Moroccan modernity. Instead, artistic toggling
from ‘local’ figure to global/network, from contemporary to historical
and vice versa brings this ongoing process to the fore.
John Nash’s Burnout is key example. During online research into
Marrakech on Youtube the artist observed that ‘traditional’ tourist
imagery of sand dunes and camels was vying for attention with radically
counter-hegemonic content: Next to a video of a Morocco Fantasia he encountered a clip called Fast and the Furious: Morocco Drift
– featuring a young man in a beaten up Mercedes performing an extensive
donut skid in a suburban street of Gueliz. The name was a modification
of the Hollywood film title The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
and the clip was set to the movie’s theme tune. The fact that Moroccan
teenagers are exposed to American cultural exports – and that these
products influence their interests and behaviour – is not a revelation.
This is happening all over the world. What interests John is the
collapse of real and virtual social space indicated by this content.
This is a ‘post-internet’ condition in which web 2.0 architecture do not
just record goings on ‘in real life’ but, instead, facilitate the
creation of virtual communities which go on to become actual groups in
offline space. Once the virtual ground is prepared, so to speak, the
real world moves. In the words of the critic Artie Vierkant: ‘Just as
Barthes’ proclamation of the “death of the author” is a celebration of
the “birth of the reader” and the “overthrow[ing] of the myth,” culture
Post-Internet is made up of reader-authors who by necessity must regard
all cultural output as an idea or work in progress able to be taken up
and continued’. The rev-head uploaders are thus the estranged cousins of
Egyptian youths in Tahrir square, and Nash’s project – which involves
communicating with them in both virtual and real space before
participating in their activities and, eventually, inviting them to
present their content at the main exhibition space of biennale – is a
true international cultural exchange.
Another work, Juergen Mayer’s sculptural re-imagination of a satellite
dish, also draws our attention to the link between immaterial data
flows, physical architecture and the constitution of social identity.
The dishes of the Medina are a clear counterpoint to the traditionalism
commonly attributed to it. Beaming down to earth amid ‘authentic’
Moroccan accoutrements such as donkeys and jellabas are moving images of
the utmost (post)modernity – analogous to the crop-topped tourists who
arrive from the sky on regular flights from Western Europe and beyond.
Here is an apt figure for the constellations – metaphorical and cosmic,
but ultimately worldly – that Marrakech partakes of; the same
constellations that John Nash explores in his participant-observer role.
But perhaps more so than internet use, which requires a level of
literacy ill-distributed throughout Morocco, the satellite dish performs
an iconic function. Indeed, the artist Younes Baba-Ali – who has
previously worked with the motif – asserts that these objects play an
important role in educating his countrymen. Whether or not one views
such an education as appropriate or, conversely, threatening, it is
useless to deny its impact. With planetary space and time collapsed by
digital communication, the proliferation of satellite dishes in the red
city is akin to the construction of thousands of new doors (babs),
portals to the beyond. Mayer’s contribution to Higher Atlas – a
fissured iron dish comprised of many Arabic numerals, overlapping and
sometimes inverted to form a complex pattern – approaches this issue.
The pattern is appropriated from a data-protection design that would
normally appear on the inside of an envelope containing a bank statement
– it is, in this sense, a border mechanism which performs a threshold
between public and private information, possession and dispossession. In
formal terms, the numbers also carry the memory of Islamic pattern
making normally apparent in traditional Moroccan window screens; in a
historical sense, the achievements of ancient Arabic philosophy while
engaging the numeric encoding of digital content transmitted and
received by the dishes – even while the content enabled by these
achievements may be written off as alien. Here, then, is a vision of
information that seems, at least in terms of route, to have arrived from
beyond this world – even as it springs from the ground beneath one’s
feet; a work that, like others in Higher Atlas, identifies play between
disappearance and revelation, location and loss, as a key cultural site.
Higher Atlas