Rotterdam
Witte de With
26/06/04 -
22/08/04
The camera focuses on the throat into which the razor-blades have just disappeared. The Adam’s apple moves at a minimal distance from the lens; it’s almost as though you can hear the rasping of the swallow. The shot lasts forever compared with the other images used in the video. The camera seems to have ‘fallen asleep’. It remains stationary in front of the razor-blade swallower, as though caught in a mixture of horror and astonishment, for just a bit longer than usual. Le Magicien (18m., 2003) is the only video in A Life Full of Holes. The Strait Project, an exhibition in Witte de With, which further consists of photographs by Yto Barrada (1971). Since 1998 Barrada has been recording life in Tangier, the Moroccan coastal city that is separated from the Iberian peninsula by a fifteen kilometre strip of water. The air there is pregnant with wishes and desires for a life ‘elsewhere’. Spain, which is visible from Tangier, entices. Every year hundreds of people risk the crossing. But the other side is a fata morgana. The new future that seems so close is an illusion: countless people find death by drowning. The Strait of Gibraltar (in Arabic as well as English the word ‘strait’ means both narrowness and distress) turns out to be not only a metonymical promise of an ‘à venir’ but also an impregnable fortress and physical obstacle.
A woman stares out somewhat dreamily into the distance. Her hands lie folded in her lap. She is photographed in sharp focus in three-quarters profile, taking up the entire left half of the picture. To her right, on a second plane and a bit more vague than she, can be seen the black holes of two door openings. From one of these a woman nonchalantly emerges, looking at the other lady. The photograph is titled Dame pipi (2001). Above the doors appears the familiar sign for men and women. The woman sitting dreaming must be the lavatory attendant. The photograph is typical of many of Barrada’s photographs of the inhabitants of Tangier. You see heads turned away, dreamy eyes gazing at a point outside the image. Yet Barrada’s framing does not get in the way of their dreams. Rather than cutting off their gaze she ‘captures’ it. Her pictures represent the extension of their phantoms or states of mind. They would have preferred to be there, on the other side of the Strait, where life has more to offer them. The blur in which Barrada shrouds the setting represents this ‘uprootedness’. The people she photographs become characters in a drama that is not of their own choosing. It is this decor that Barrada then plays out for you in other pictures.
Terrain vague (1999) shows an arid field of grass with a solitary palm tree. Unshorn sheep are grazing in the field in the blazing sun against a background of a shabby, grey apartment building. A photograph of the Bay of Tangier (2002) offers you a wide view of the city seen from the distance. It is a panorama, a picture postcard. And of course there has to be a genuine aerial view of the Strait of Gibraltar (2003), the reason for, and subject of, Barrada’s project. These photographs leave nothing to the imagination. They are exquisite pictures, pinpoint-sharp in all their facets, more illustrative or informative. By turns you are a tourist at a distance and a voyeur. And Barrada appears to be aware of this, as can be seen in a photograph such as Papier peint (2001) where we are confronted with a kitschy piece of wallpaper peeling away at the edges. The wallpaper says less about the dwelling itself than about the idyllic scene it depicts: this pastoral too has ceased to exist.
A Life Full of Holes. The Strait Project wants to make visible all these untold stories and mental images of the inhabitants of Tangier. Her photographs have a matt finish, so your eyes do not bounce off against a glossy photographic surface. They are square in format. Effortlessly you become aware of that which ‘they’ refuse to discuss. There are no limits to Barrada’s urge to recount what everyone keeps silent about. At the same time the Strait is Barrada’s own story: her parental home is in Tangier. Although Barrada herself left it, the city retains its attraction. Her love for Tangier remains undisputed. It means that her photographs possess the melancholic emotional charge of the Tangier dreams and a quiet intimacy that Barrada grasps because she understands it. The extensive subtitles and captions sometimes take the edge off her pictures and deprive them of their casualness. It is more than Barrada’s amazement that resounds from the unconcealed zooming in on the razor-blade swallower’s throat. Her camera is compelling enough.
The pain of the characters, however, is inherent in her photographs. This she does not have to control. Into her compositions creeps an incredulity, sadness and the difficulty in breathing, as signified by the Strait. Through the way she shows her images, A Life Full of Holes. The Strait Project becomes a painfully razor-sharp, concerned and personal document.
Yto Barrada, A Life Full of Holes. The Strait Project
Witte de With, Rotterdam
26 June - 22 August 2004
