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‘Revisiting the history of Morocco, for me, this was a way to make proper sense of our history, to take it out of parochialism while retaining the traces of what has been witnessed.’(1)
It was in 2011, that Mohssin Harraki first exhibited Pierre dans la marre, or Stone in the Pond that is included in the exhibition, Hudud, that this volume accompanies. A work consisting of 40 books made of concrete, the series represents the standard text books produced by the Moroccan Ministry of Education between the 1980s to 1990s, used by children up to the age of 16. The project grew out of a residency at Cinémathèque de Tanger following an invitation by Yto Barrada, and was then shown at Appartement 22, an art space in Rabat created by Abdella Karroum in 2002.(2) Stacked in piles or on shelves, each book, now dipped in cement covers a different subject. These were Harraki’s own books: Tarikh (History), al-Riyadiyyat (Mathematics), al-Fikr al-Islami wa’l Falsafa (Islamic Thought and Philosophy), al-‘Ulum al-Tabi‘iyya (the Natural Sciences) and others, passed, over the years, between neighbours and friends. Rendering them in concrete, as he observes: ‘is a way for me, on a formal level, to keep the shape of a book while purposely not being able to access any of its content.’(3) ‘Fossilised education’ is how Sultan Al Qassemi refers to this act of creating a book rendered inaccessible, asking the question: does this contribute to the fossilisation of our minds?(4)
Harraki describes how the exhibition was received: ‘visitors identified with them, everyone had an anecdote to tell that reminded them of that time.’ ‘That time’, as Harraki recalls was a violent period known as ‘The Years of Lead’, 1970-1999. You only have to read Leïla Slimani’s Au pays des autres to get a real sense of the build up to this moment of Morocco’s post colonial history.(5)
2011, was of course the year that is often referred as ‘The Arab Spring’ which began in Tunisia where they call it thawrat al-karama, ‘the revolution of dignity.’ With repercussions throughout the Middle East and North Africa, in Morocco, as Harraki says: ‘people could at that point, at last, talk freely’ – the hudud of that difficult earlier period had passed.
One of the meanings of Pierre dans la marre is that it can allude to a moment or an act that sets in motion unforseen or unconnected events. These are the moments that can break the hudud, a word that goes much beyond the basic meaning of boundary or borders. For Harraki’s books represent the hudud of the mind. As Harraki described to Tina Barouti, ‘these textbooks have, for me, the shape of usual books of knowledge but they have failed in their initial mission to educate because often they dealt with propaganda and falsified information about culture, history and other topics related to society. It [the project] was also a little self-reminder of the total hatred I had towards these textbooks when I was at school.’(6) In their monumentality and breadth of vision, Harraki’s Pierre dans la marre recalls the lead books of German artist Anselm Kiefer, in which he alludes to collective memory, history and myth making.(7) Harraki, similarly preoccupied by these subjects, has been fascinated by books from an early age: ‘I remember the first book I found, called Al-Maraya [Mirrors] (1971) by Naguib Mahfouz….reading became like a ritual’ he told Barouti, and, increasingly his books have taken on ever more thought provoking forms and meanings often taking historical or literary texts as the initial inspiration, from Aquarium series (2014), where books are placed in tanks of water, to books in glass: Histoire (2013) and Rubayat Omar Khayyam (2015); his Description de l’Afrique - Rhizome takes as his starting point the book of the traveller Hassan al-Wazzan also known as Leo Africanus (1485 -c.1554) is an installation comprising drawings and books encased in cabbles; with a another work made from bread La faiblesse forte, et la force faible, 2012 (the weak is strong, the strong is weak), the Arabic words al-da‘if qawi, al-qawi da‘if printed over the loaves.(8) In Greffer, Espalier, Dresser, also exhibited at Appartement 22, it is the founders of Moroccan political parties since 1937 that act as the starting point for drawings and a metal book; the title coming from a botanical technique used for fruits where they are trained to grow flat against a wall or a trellis which for Harraki provides a parallel for the patriarchial history that has been transmitted over decades.(9)
‘Generation 00’, the generation of Harraki, formed the third part of Moroccan trilogy, 1950-2020, the important exhibition of Moroccan art shown at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid in 2021 curated by Manuel Borja-Villel and Abdellah Karroum(10). As described by the curators: this is ‘a generation of young artists who broke off from the past on the formal, technical, symbolic and political planes of art.’
The Madrid exhibition took a broad view of the rich history of the Modern and Contemporary art of Morocco now increasingly known through the work of Morad Montazami and others with the exhibitions of the Casablanca School at Tate St Ives and in Sharjah in particular.(11) And that rich history has particular resonnance for Harraki. He was born in Assilah, a city he did not leave until he was 20 years old. Described as an open-air museum, 1978 saw the first edition of the Cultural Moussem of Assilah. Artists from around the world came to lead print workshops, while the city itself was transformed by glorious murals painted by school children and leading Moroccan artists. Harraki describes how they would await the Moussem with anticipation, to see what it would bring next. Among the initiators of the Moussem, was Mohamed Melehi (1936-2023), himself born in Asilah(12) and Mohamed Chabâa, born in Tangier (1935-2013), both of whom trained at L’école des beaux arts in Tetouan where, decades later, Harraki was to study. Arriving from Assilah on the bus, he describes it as a ‘foreign place’, and, despite wanting to study art, it took him four tries to get into the school, studying mathematics in the meantime.
Asilah and Tetouan were under Spanish colonial domination until 1956, the same year that French occupation of the southern region of Moroccan was ended. In regard to the teaching of art, unlike Casablanca where French academic painting was taught until the arrival of Farid Belkahia (1934-2014) in 1962, the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan was started by the Spanish painter Mariano Bertuchi and therefore oriented towards Spanish art. Considered at the forefront of art education in Morocco, Mohamed Chabâa was director of the school between 1994 and 1998 and an enduring influence at the school from which Harraki graduated in 2007. From there, subsequently pursuing his studies in Toulon and Dijon, today, Harraki is based in Paris, his work collected and shown by institutions internationally. His most recent work, Quand la géographie devient abstraite – 2022(13) (When geography becomes abstract) is an imaginary dialogue between two thinkers and geographers Girard Desargues, French mathematician and engineer (1591- 1661) and the Moroccan geographer and map maker Muhammad al-Idrissi (1100-1165). Imagining between them a dialogue that transcends time space and geography, it seems to contain an echo of a much earlier work, Passport (2009). Here he brought together the covers of passports from around the world, where he asks the question: is it the passport that gives a person their identity or is it person who gives the identity to the passport? While the passport(14) continues as the powerful symbol of identity and freedom highlighted by anither artist in this exhibition Walid Al Wawi (IMAGE), we return to the notion of those pervasive, often arbitray Hudud, both physical and of the mind that continue to shape the world of today and onto which Mohssin Harraki offers his own rich perpective in the art he makes.
Venetia Porter, 2 May 2024
Hudud of the mind
(1)‘Family Ties: Mohssin Harraki in conversation with Karima Boudou,’ 010_04 / 26 September 2016, my translation
https://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/202. I would like to thank Sultan Al Qassemi for the invitation to contribute this essay, and to Natasha Morris and Abdella Karroum for their help in its preparation. It is based on a conversation with Mohssin Harraki on 18th April. I thank him for offering me such insights into his extraordinary and important work.
(2) Family Ties op cit.
(3) Family Ties op cit.
(4) https://sultanalqassemi.com/videos/mohsin-harraki-fossilised-education/ (accessed 29 April 2024). For an explanation of the contexts of production of the Moroccan textbooks of the period and their arabisation, see Emma Chubb in Mohssin Harraki, Greffer, Espalier, Dresser, ed. Abdella Karroum (Digital edition, Editions HorsChamps, 2020) pp. 18-19; http://appartement22.com/spip.php?article375 (accessed 30 April 2024).
(5) Leïla Slimani, Le pays des autres and Regardez-nous danser (Paris: Galimard 2022).
(6) Family Ties op cit.
(7) For the books of Anselm Kiefer see http://www.neugraphic.com/kiefer/kiefer-text7.html (accessed 29 April 2024); The Books of Anselm Kiefer 1969-1990 (London: Thames and Hudson 1991).
(8) See Mohssin Harraki website https://www.mohssinharraki.com/ (accessed 2 May 2024).
(9) Mohssin Harraki, Greffer, Espalier, Dresser, texts by Abdella Karroum and Emma Chubb (Digital edition, Editions HorsChamps, 2020); http://appartement22.com/spip.php?article375 (accessed 30 April 2024.
(10) https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/moroccan-trilogy (accessed 30 April 2024).
(11) The Casablanca Art School, Tate St Ives 27 May 2023 – 14 January 2024 https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-st-ives/casablanca-art-school (accessed 1 May 2024); The Casablanca Art School: Platforms and Patterns for a Postcolonial Avant-Garde Al Hamiriyah Studios and Old Diwan Al Amiri, Al Hamriyah 24 February – 16 June 2024. https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/exhibitions/the-casablanca-art-school-platforms-and-patterns-for-a-postcolonial-avant-g. Guidebook with texts by May Alqaydi, Morad Montazami, Hoor Al Qasimi, (Sharjah: Sharjah Art Foundation 2024). Maroc: Une identité modern, exhibition catalogue IMA-Tourcoing 15 February – 14 June 2020, edited by Françoise Cohen (Lille: edition invenit 2020); Morad Montazami (ed.) Volumes Fugitifs (Kulte Editions, 2016).
(12) Maroc: une identité, p.36.
(13) https://www.mohssinharraki.com/copie-de-045-ombre-des-racines-s-3
(14) https://www.mohssinharraki.com/002-world-passport-2009, (accessed 30 April 2024).