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This spring, the first symposium AiR Perspectives Morocco took place in Marrakech. Co-organised by Heidi Vogels from DutchCulture/TransArtists and the 5th Marrakech Biennale, it brought together several of Morocco’s independent art spaces in order to exchange thought on their way of working and the possibilities to engage artists and audiences on local, countrywide and international scales altogether. Given that these artistic spaces, most of which are centrally or exclusively run as residencies, create the whole of the scene of contemporary art in Morocco, this meeting somewhat highlights a moment in time.

The late 1990’s: the first, self-organised art spaces

In the late 1990s, an internationally forced change of the regime towards participation allowed oppositional, intellectual forces to get a foot into the door of the political and social system that was now striving towards global involvement. While visual art within that moment of transition began to be recognised, however in rather economical terms, a handful of people realised the need for critical reflection upon the intellectual gap that opened between tradition and progression.

It was in this context that the first, self-organised art spaces were created. Initiatives such as L’appartement 22 or La Source du Lion of the early 2000s were then followed by a second wave of art spaces and residencies that went public with their programme within the last four years.

While La Source du Lion is an independent artist initiative that is essentially a project space more than a residency, L’appartement 22 and Le Cube emerged as non-profit, curatorial initiatives that have created residencies in the context of seeking to provide spaces for contemporary conceptual artistic practices and new audiences. Nowadays, their work is being accompanied and continued by an increasing variety of spaces: Spaces that offer residencies to engage urban contexts (as does The Ultra Laboratory) coexist with those that offer retreat residencies offsite urban centers (such as Dar Al Mam’un or Café Tissardmine). No matter if, as in the case of the former example, run by a singular artist or, as in the latter case, organised by artistic, curatorial or multi-disciplinary collectives, residencies are created without or by different means of funding and are realised within varying, yet explicitly artistic and educational programmes.

The encounter through the residency

What consequentially appears to unite the number of the around 16, very heterogenous and spatially scattered spaces is the way in which they orbit around the idea of the encounter through the concept of the residency. As for Abdellah Karroum, the founder of L’appartement 22 in Rabat, to “offer a residency to an artist is not a program, but it is a dialogue with a context”. In terms in which, then, for Karroum, a residency means an invitation for an artist to be part of a process that creates movement between “transnational research and local action” and that does not necessitate results in form of artistic production, L’appartement 22 primarily understands itself as a mission that develops in and with time.

In varying dimensions of such theoretical framing, all other Moroccan art spaces comparably depart from the idea to realise residencies in order to facilitate encounters between artists invited and the local – spatial, cultural or political – environment. In case of the art space Trankat in Tétouan, initiated in 2008, the implementation of a residency resulted from the city’s very specific reality.

Trankat, Tétouan and its art academies

Geographically rather secluded in the mountains of Northern Morocco and at the same time characterised by its proximity to Europe, Tétouan has a rich cultural history that reflects in the authenticity of the Medina, the old part of the city, and the presence of Andalusian architectural and historical influences. Above that, Tétouan is the home of three public art schools – a school of Architecture, a school of Arts and Crafts and one of Fine Arts, the only national art school in Morocco. For that reason, students and young people pass through Tétouan but, for those few that decide to stay with the visual arts, leave again for the bigger cities Rabat, Marrakech or Casablanca or try to go abroad. Departing from this paradoxical situation, Trankat was founded by the wish to support the local contemporary art scene and to draw attention to the still resonating cultural vibrancy of the city.

In specific, the founders of Trankat, artist Younès Rahmoun from Tétouan and the French curator Bérénice Saliou, have therefore equipped the residency with two main criteria – to get inspired by the artistic and artisanal context of the Medina and to give at least one workshop with the students of one of the art schools. While also other events and exhibitions are organised around the residency to bring together students, artists, intellectuals and other people interested, the wish to mediate the potential to translate heritage and craft into new, lively contexts co-exists with their central goal to foster cross-cultural encounters and the exchange of (artistic) knowledge.

Given that art academies along with other forms of public education are compromised in their means by a lack of governmental funding, art students are too often left with few critical tools and without a network to build upon. While an initiative like Trankat aims at providing such conditions, it struggles to receive support from the Moroccan authorities and thus seeks international funding in order to provide the artists in residence with accomodation, a mobility grant and production fees. With the support of the French Institute Morocco, that also holds its own residency space within Trankat, and through applying for international call for projects or with foundations from the Arab World it is able to invite international artists along with artists from Morocco, yet rather meaning artists already somewhat established and internationally connected. In this sense, and in the words of Bérénice Saliou, the artistic and educative work of Trankat is “a way to connect an international scale to a very local scale”.

The friction between international orientation and the lack of infrastructure

While in these terms workshops with invited artists appear to be most beneficial for Moroccan art students that are also presented with the possibility to network internationally, it inevitably points to the friction between an international orientation and the lack of a functional educative and artistic infrastructure in Morocco itself. Not only are many art spaces themselves run by foreigners or Moroccan born intellectuals that have been educated or been living abroad. Public art institutions, in contrary to the policies of international knowledge exchange of larger museums world wide, further remain exclusively in the hands of Moroccan administration.

While, then, the private organisation of the art spaces grants them a certain freedom of their agenda, the need for funding most often forces them into a pre-selection of those artists to call on. In line with this practical dimension of deciding which artists and from where to invite, the artistic spaces are constantly confronted with the necessity to argue for their own work alongside with their internal decision for an artist. In terms in which such mechanisms of selection ultimately mean lesser possibilities for a wider, local scene of artists and art students, it also endues the art spaces with a certain sense of exclusivity: “There is a massive gap, it is like you have different circles and spheres evolving next to each other without touching”, says Saliou.

Yet, the gap between locality and internationality does not diminish the the engagement and the ambitions of the various initiatives. In particular, the awareness of the importance of both education and mobility of the artist inside Morocco appears not not only to be part of how individual initiatives take responsibility in focusing on the concept of the encounter but is furthermore at the verge of becoming a shared concern of the different artistic spaces altogether.

Bearing in mind the fact that the scene is still relatively young and that it in its struggle for survival might also be forced into competition, a second meeting amongst participating initiatives at the beginning of may hints at the tentative, continued collaborative potential between the different players. Maybe, this greater collaboration might be able to set in motion an institutionalisation of persistent questions about the artistic infrastructure in Morocco as well as more concretely advance the possibility to create educative circuits for artists, for those that come as much as for those that stay.