A LAB FOR ART IN THE PUBLIC REALM
The CASABLANCA ART SCHOOL wanted to make art part of urban life, visible for all, and interacting with the everyday culture of the city. To this day, the “Asilah Cultural Moussem” cultural festival shows how it set out to realize these grand ideas.
By Sarah DornhofSince the late 1960s, artists from the Casablanca Art School embarked down new paths to present their art in the urban space and to use the city as a space for reflection on their art. In 1969, they first tried out the strategy with street exhibitions entitled “Présence Plastique” in public plazas in Marrakesh and Casablanca, and as of 1978 they turned the small town of Asilah in North Morocco into a lab for art in the public realm. Their wish to take art out of elitist institutions and quite literally onto the street and to engage with the culture and cultural heritage of Moroccan cities had a strong echo in Asilah in a way that assumed new tones even if there was as good as no resounding response in the major cities.
The “Asilah Cultural Moussem” festival was primarily linked to the art school through its co-founder, Mohamed Melehi. Together with his childhood friend, Mohamed Benaïssa, who at the time was a member of the Asilah Town Council and from the 1980s onwards clad various ministerial and diplomatic posts, and along with Toni Maraini in 1978 Melehi established the festival in his hometown of Asilah – a small town with a rich history but at the time very neglected on the Atlantic coast not far from Tanger.
A progressive festival in politically troubled times
Melehi had in the early 1970s already distanced himself from the leftist-oriented circle within the Casablanca Art School. He had quit the “Souffles-Anfas” journal even before it was prohibited in 1972, and its co-founders arrested and had instead started publishing the journal “Integral”. The foundation of the “Moussem” in Asilah should therefore also be seen against the background of the massive political and cultural repression in Morocco. During that time, Melehi, Maraini, and Benaïssa succeeded in founding a major international festival in a small town far away from the centers of power, one that enabled new participative art formats and progressive debates in the public realm and at the same time enjoyed the support of the monarchy and international patrons, above all from the Gulf states. Nevertheless, there were also local initiatives, writers and intellectuals who feared the marketing of culture and the suppression of local arts by the political and economic interests of the “moussem” which to their mind focused less on an artistic movement and primarily on urban development.
There were already plans afloat for an international cultural festival in Asilah during the summer months of 1978, and these in part merged with the “moussem” or community festival organized by Benaïssa, Maraini, and Melehi. In its first year, the program was accordingly diverse and indeed almost overladen with ideas. Over the course of several weeks that summer there were exhibitions, concerts, theater performances and film screenings, rounded out by workshops and conferences. As early as the spring, important artists in Morocco were invited to take part who were also representatives of the Casablanca Art School or at least considered part of its wider circle, and they were asked to design the facades of houses in Asilah. Among them were Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, Miloud Labied, Mohamed Hamidi, Mohamed Chabâa, Saad Hassani, Chaibia Talal, Hossein Miloudi, Mohamed Kacimi, and Abderrahmane Rahoule.
Their large, very colorful wall paintings on the white houses in the Medina, the old part of town, became the trademark of the new festival and the town itself. Most of them were produced in collaboration with school children, remained on the respective walls for a year, and were then redesigned by the artists who were then invited to participate. Moreover, from the very beginning, greater attention was paid to integrating Asilah’s inhabitants into the festival. During the summer, local stores were able to benefit from the thousands of visitors, money flowed into restoring historical buildings and urban infrastructure, an old palace was expanded into a cultural center, and new cultural facilities were set up. Above all children and young people were able to take part, with Toni Maraini acting as the educational director, and helped whitewash the walls, keep the town clean, and assist the artists in their work.
Twixt local traditions and new trends
The festival’s integrative and seasonal aspect is also reflected in the word “moussem”, which in Morocco refers to an annual communal festivity on the occasion of the harvest or in order to revere the local saint. This reference to local traditions may have been meant to distinguish the event from the existing international festival and to strengthen the acceptance of the new by relating it to what was culturally established, in particular as regards the wall paintings which completely changed the face of the town. On the other hand, this cannot conceal the fact that the Asilah Moussem, which is now in its 45th iteration, has down through the years acquired a highly exclusive character; often the selfsame artists were repeatedly invited to attend, and the festival did little to support younger generations of artists and artistic innovation let alone being open to such trends.
If, by contrast, we concentrate on the early editions of the festival, then it is fair to say that in Asilah something was successfully practiced on a small scale that had already been developed by way of grand ideas in Casablanca: Different arts, styles, origins, and generations met one another and made art and culture a decisive feature of the town. The “Asilah Cultural Moussem” thus became a comprehensive project driven by cultural politics, turning a small coastal town for a few weeks each summer into a stage and an venue for international encounters between artists, writers, and intellectuals, while also creating a creative and thought space for postcolonial cultural developments in the African and Arab-influenced countries.