Five questions for Salma Lahlou from Thin­kArt Casa­blanca

My encounter with the Casablanca Art School dates back to 2015. For the 6th edition of the Marrakech Bien­nial, enti­tled “Not New Now?” (February-June 2016), Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa and I were invited by Reem Fadda to curate an exhi­bi­tion about the school and the people who shaped its new peda­gogy.

Estab­lished in the 1920s by the French colo­nial author­i­ties and offi­cially inau­gu­rated in 1951, l’École munic­i­pale des beaux-arts de Casablanca (the city’s fine art school) played a key role in breaking new ground and reshaping the epis­te­mology of cultural disci­plines, carried forward by an entire gener­a­tion of artists, poets, writers, film­makers, archi­tects, play­wrights, and musi­cians. In the 1960s, the school under­went a phase of renewal spurred by artists like Farid Belkahia (1934–2014), Mohammed Chabâa (1935–2013), and Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020), the art histo­rian and anthro­pol­o­gist Toni Maraini, as well as Bert Flint (1931–2022), an Afro-Berber art researcher and linguist, and a passionate expert on folk art and rural tradi­tions. They were later joined by three other artists and facil­i­ta­tors, Mohamed Ataallah (1939-2014), Mustapha Hafid, and Mohamed Hamidi, who brought together artistic-aesthetic notions with ideas of social reform and eman­ci­pa­tion to form a joint cultural project. What was then referred to as the Casablanca Art School desig­nates both the insti­tu­tion during its golden age (1964–1969) and the aesthetic revo­lu­tion embodied in the works of the artists-tutors.

Conducting, processing and exhibiting this research became much more than a simple object of study. It made me aware of a major problem: the failure to pass on whole swathes of our iden­tity. As little is passed on to us, we have to appro­priate the knowl­edge, gestures and narra­tives that consti­tute our collec­tive memory. I remember being quite upset when I read Abdel­latif Laâbi’s “Le gâchis”, published in 1967 in the avant-garde cultural publi­ca­tion “Souf­fles” in its special issue on the plastic arts in Morocco. I couldn’t under­stand why this peri­od­ical wasn’t studied at school. Can you imagine that at the École Supérieure des beaux-arts of Casablanca, this founding period of our social, cultural and polit­ical iden­tity is not passed on to the students?

And it is precisely in response to this “failure to transmit” that we under­took the “School of Casablanca” project.

The Resi­dency and public programs took place between September 2020 and December 2022. Each partic­i­pant took a crit­ical look at one of the issues raised within the school that echoed their own prac­tice, with the aim of posing ques­tions about the legacy of the Casablanca Art School within the current socio-polit­ical climate of Casablanca and Morocco.

I will outline the parts that consti­tute the school’s contri­bu­tion before moving on to the partic­i­pants’ research proposals: The artists and theo­reti­cians of the school posi­tioned them­selves by advo­cating the visceral link between modern artistic produc­tion and plastic tradi­tions; an aesthetic of orna­mental abstrac­tion; flat­tening the hier­archy set up by the French between fine and tradi­tional arts; the aboli­tion of the divide between art and life; a trans­versal approach to art; the status of art as a space for shared knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence; the role of the artist as the producer of a social and cultural project; making art public by weaving their art into the fabric of the city and greater society.

I loved so many proposals if not to say all of them. I was partic­u­larly taken with Manuel Raeder’s manhole covers and street furni­ture, their play on the public’s uses and projec­tions, where nothing is static. The fiction-reality that Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa imag­ined around the epis­te­mo­log­ical rupture between Bert Flint and Toni Maraini helped to fill a void around ques­tions of validity and hier­ar­chies between acad­e­mi­cism and heuris­tics. Céline Condorelli inscribed the visual language of abstrac­tion as women’s labour in a monu­mental instal­la­tion she produced using carpets collected in Boujaad as the source of her produc­tion, at the same time as setting up a support struc­ture for weavers in collab­o­ra­tion with the erudite carpet dealer and collector Rabii Bibi Alouani. Abdeslam Ziou Ziou teamed up with artists to create a space for the display, recep­tion and discus­sion around the issue of art and psychi­atry, engaging with his father’s work, a psychi­a­trist who worked with the artists of the Casablanca Art School at the Berrechid psychi­atric insti­tu­tion in 1981. Amina Belghiti looked at the sonic imag­i­nary of the period, listening to the gaps, absences, silences in and around the school. Peter Spill­mann made avail­able Marion von Osten’s archives on Casablanca in a modular container with a signif­i­cant piece called “la bibilothèque de passage” at ThinkArt. To name but a few.

Lies­beth Bik and Jos van der Pol were among the first resi­dents. For them, walking in the city is a natural ‘modus operandi’, as they prac­tice it system­at­i­cally, as a lifestyle. I immersed myself in their prac­tice by studying their body of work, and it was through them that I was truly able to assim­i­late what art as a social prac­tice implies. And thank­fully so, because I could better under­stand Ruan­grupa’s Docu­menta!

In the course of our many discus­sions, Lies­beth invited me to acti­vate another prism and see objects as models of poten­tiality or ‘tools for poten­tial’ by inte­grating the nuance between what objects do versus how objects look.

Walking has the ability to connect us differ­ently to each other, widen our perspec­tives and make us aware of the urban terrain that was acti­vated by artists from the outset. It was partic­u­larly mean­ingful to me to invite Hassan Darsi, whom I see as one of the most signif­i­cant socially engaged artist working in Morocco. His work on the Parc de l’Hermitage was a mile­stone for my gener­a­tion because it disrupted admin­is­tra­tive apathy and enabled local resi­dents to reclaim a public park that had been left in a state of complete disarray. Fatima Mazmouz embodied our polit­ical resis­tance in an active march to revisit streets named after lesser known histor­ical figures whose stories are not often told to younger gener­a­tions. Mohamed Fariji and his project for a collec­tive museum in Casablanca showed how the city neglects its archi­tec­tural assets, letting them rot away while we suffer from a lack of avail­able space for talks, exhi­bi­tions and so on.

Walking acti­vates a different kind of atten­tion because it involves the body, engaging the senses as well as the mind. It bypasses the lecture format, which puts the lecturer at the centre; instead, informal conver­sa­tions abound. It’s a way of expe­ri­encing the city in a different way to the tradi­tional guided city tours. Casablanca is not a single trail. Numerous routes and sections exist, allowing us to forge new bonds and provoke unex­pected discus­sions between walkers, which opens up new perspec­tives. We continued these walks during the exhi­bi­tion in Casablanca and I hope to keep orga­nizing them in the future.

I would say that it’s about taking into consid­er­a­tion the socio-polit­ical context of the time and responding to it with actions that are rele­vant both formally and the space in which they exist. Initia­tives such as ‘La Source du lion’, ‘L’Atelier de l’obser­va­toire’, ‘Darjaa’ and more recently ‘Malhoun’, ‘Siniya’ and ‘CARCDAM’ are exam­ples of this aware­ness.

Collab­o­ra­tions, research, field work, exper­i­men­ta­tion, care and disrup­tions are key.