The Casablanca Art School (1962-1987) (EMPIRE LINES x Tate St Ives)

Empire lines uncovers the unexpected, often two-way flows of empires through art. Interdisciplinary thinkers use individual artworks as artifacts of imperial exchange, revealing the how and why of the monolith empire. In this episode, curator Mourad Montezami assembles the revolutionary artist's professors and students of the Casablanca Art School, who constructed the post-colonial state of Morocco in the 20th century, and how North African crafts people practiced in both transnational networks and local traditions which predated Western European modernism. So my name is Mourad Montezami. I used to be a curator for Middle Eastern and North African art at the Tate, and then I created an independent platform, which is called Zamon Books and Curating. So I'm the curator or the co-curator with my colleague Madeline de Colne of this exhibition called Casablanca Art School Platforms and Patterns for a post-colonial avant-garde, which is a subject that I've been researching since my arrival at the Tate, 2014, and this is clearly the very comprehensive and I hope a complete panoramic view of the Casablanca Art School history and the artistic network behind it. The school proposed a bold revolutionary new wave of visual culture following Morocco's declaration of independence from French and Spanish colonial rule in 1956. But unlike Algeria, which was more formally a part of France, Morocco was technically a protectorate, and I wonder what did this mean in practice? Was culture and the Casablanca art school itself always more independent in its practice? As its sheer existence, the school was founded under the French protectorate, and there was not so much difference between a protectorate and a colony. Strictly speaking, it would entail the same domination relationship between European colonial empire and African or Arab countries. Actually, during the French protectorate in Morocco, the artisan and craftman and traditional arts were also kind of highlighted and preserved in a way by the French and the Spanish because Morocco was both under French and Spanish protectorate, the Spanish in the north of Morocco. But what the Casablanca Art School became after independence was obviously totally different and totally opposite. But it didn't happen in one day because the independence of Morocco is 1956, but it took six years to have a Moroccan director at the Casablanca Art School and to have a more grassroots group of students coming from all the social class of Moroccan society, which was not the case before. The school was very much Western-driven and Western-minded and also mostly from the higher class society. So definitely the arrival of Farid Balcahia as a director of the Casablanca Art School and all the artists who will come along from then, or a revolution, or something that nobody was expecting, something that they created from a grassroots perspective, which was basically to give up easel painting and to give up the Western kind of pedagogy in favor of more experimental art, be it in painting or photography or collage, they even created graphic design studio, which basically never existed before them. It was a whole palette and a whole ensemble of medias and experimentation, again, that even brought them to create interior design studios and to create works integrated into hotels, into banks, into semi-public spaces, obviously also showing their work in the street. All of that was part of a kind of groundbreaking new infrastructure that didn't exist before, even modern and contemporary art museum didn't exist before the 21st century. There were definitely not only showing us artists, but also creating the platforms and the patterns for the conditions to show art, to organize artistic events, and to acknowledge conditions of existence for Moroccan artists. For example, they will be the first to create an artist's indicate, which will be the Moroccan Association of Plastic Artists. So they did much more than just being artist or even art teachers. They literally created very progressively a whole infrastructure and ecosystem for Moroccan art by Moroccan artists. And from the 1960s, these so-called artist professors really started to look beyond Western European art traditions, as you mentioned, as the director, Farid Belkahi, one of the Casablanca trio, along with Muhammad Shabbar and Muhammad Malahi in particular. And he demanded that all Greco-Roman sculptures be removed from the building altogether. As a potential fourth in that Casablanca trio, Tony Morini, who established Morocco's first modern art history course, and the exhibition features these amazing archive photographs of the research trips that students took all across Morocco. This brought them into contact with what's described here as naive or folk art. And I wonder, as much as the movement sought to tackle elitism in art, did this travel also reinforce some of those regional differences in hierarchies? Yes, absolutely. One of their main motos was to travel in the rural regions around Marakesh and through the high Atlas, and the Great South of Morocco, where you have very small mosques, sometimes with only two or three worshipers, with containing incredible painted ceilings that you can see in some of the archival photos of the show, and also, obviously, jewelry and tapestry. They were extremely fascinated by the modernity of these tapestry jewelry. How is it possible that a rug has comparable geometry and visual dynamic than a polically painting or a kandinsky painting when the craftman or craftwoman who created it never heard about polically or kandinsky? So they were immediately compelled by this idea that a kind of grassroots modernity pre-existing to Western abstraction only needed to be revealed when Mellahi and Belkahia enrolled Bert Flint as a professor of popular African art. Bert Flint literally began to collect these objects. And so through Bert Flint collection of different arts and craft, the school integrated all of these influences both through the documentation with photography, but physically, because Bert was collecting these objects, and he could show them to the students, and to have the students basically rediscover their own visual culture with its own right to modernity beyond Western modernism. And you mentioned Bert Flint. He is a Dutch anthropologist who's teaching at the school at the time, and the school has these very international connections. Belkahia spent two years in Czechoslovakia, Mellahi travelled to Mexico for the 1968 Olympics, and that brought them particularly into contact with the Bauhaus. The school in Weimar, Germany, which by this point has been disbanded for decades, how did the Bauhaus and its interdisciplinary practice really influence this very cool modern style that we see? Yes, the Casablanca art school artists were always compelled by it, as soon as they discovered the history and the influence of the Bauhaus school in Europe and beyond. And Mellahi and Shaba in Italy, in Rome, where the Bauhaus was very much influential, and Belkahia in Paris and Prague, it's incredible how Mellahi and Tony Maraini materialized this influence and this kind of trans-historical dialogue, you know, the Bauhaus was so transnational, I wouldn't even call the Bauhaus a strictly Western school, because the Bauhaus was not only composed of Eastern Europe and even Latin American students, and the whole displacement of the Bauhaus schools from Germany to the United States in the Second World War experience, dealing with exile, displacement. To my view makes the Bauhaus more than a strictly Western art school, Erbert Bayer, who we have the very beautiful Silic print, who is this major figure of the Bauhaus school, was very much influenced by the Moroccan landscape and by the chromatic environment of Morocco, and during the course of the '70s, both a house in Tangiers in the north of Morocco, because Mellahi is from the north of Morocco. As you said, they met for the first time at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, which had a symposium sculpture, in which Herbert Bayer represented Germany and Mellahi represented Morocco, and then they even did interviews together and there is one. one issue of the integral magazine run by Mellehi with an interview with Herbert Bayer to kind of materialize this long term kind of artistic friendship, even if it was a time remote and materialized later between the Bauhaus and the Casablanque Arts School. (upbeat music) - And as much as there's this focus on exhibitions there's also a great focus on designers part of everyday life. We see how interiors are used for the Casablanque and National Bank for Economic Development, the National Tourist Office's hotels. How important was art at this time in the construction of the post-colonial nation? - Extremely strategic and instrumental in the sense that there wasn't a museum of modern and contemporary art in Morocco, actually even until the 21st century. And it's the absence of a proper museum infrastructure that brought this artist to reimagine a more grassroots and integrated artistic interventions. Actually they would speak about integrated arts or integrations which could be integrating their works by commissions in hotels, in banks, in theater halls and in other kinds of public spaces. Again, this idea of breaking the boundaries between fine art, design, even decorative arts, also combinations of interior design and graphic design and that all of these different trends and different technique had to be combined in a sort of encompassing definition of art and encompassing artists, artisans, or decorative and avant-garde and through this encompassing dialectic being able to even occupy different layers of Moroccan society, a nation building itself upon a national utopia, a post-colonial utopia which will materialize in this visual culture. A visual culture that comprises some Western influence or transnational influence but also can feel integrally Moroccan and African and Mediterranean to the real people and the real people would be people who don't go to see exhibitions, people who don't have an experience of going to galleries or to museum, hence the importance of showing their art in alternative spaces. - One of the Casablanca trio, Mohammed Shabbar, says the poster is a painting that is accessible to all and graphic design is especially important. In the exhibition, there is this great wall of posters and also covers from Suf Journal. How did it become a radical anti-imperialist platform and use art in order to decolonize and democratize art even further? - Yes, indeed, there came very early on with this idea of working in graphic design. There was even a graphic design studio opened by Mohammed Shabbar in the school. Before Mohammed Shabbar and Melehi would open their own graphic design studio which became two independent and commercial entities, Studio 400 created by Shabbar and Studio Suf created by Melehi were both then active in working logos even for banks or publishers or shops from the most grassroots grocery to the biggest bank or even university. And they also raised maybe the first generation of Moroccan graphic designers because again, in this idea of a newly independent country, building itself through new infrastructures, new architecture and new ecosystem involving a cultural art scene, commercial relations, basically the idea that this young or future artist should be integrated to the economy, should have a work, not remain artist suspended in a kind of sheer poetic or romantic life but on the contrary, integrated to the economy of this newly independent country. So Suf was really one of the first radical anti-colonial journal in which most of the greatest activists, poets, writers such as Abdelatif Labi or Mustafa Nisaburi or Tahab Benjelun were the main voices and Melehi and Shabbar were the visual force behind it to create the cover, the logo or even to include their documentation of street exhibition in some issues of the Suf journal. So obviously with the leftist, strong tendency, Marxist and Pan-Arab, you could say, or Pan-African because they were also very much related to other African platforms like the Dakar 1966 festival, the same year that Suf was created. And eventually it became this incredible collaborative and collective publication, which nowadays we can read in order to understand each stake and each political stance that they took involving also more dramatic days, like for example the imprisonment of Muhammad Shabbar for a year and also especially the founder of the Suf journal who was Abdelatif Labi for eight years. So he spent most of the 70s and 80s in jail and then was liberated and exiled to France where he still lives. - These works really are embodiments of connections between these countries. We see ones that were displayed at the first Pan-Arab biennial at Baghdad Museum of Modna in 1974. In 1978 there's the International Art Exhibition for Palestine. I wonder though, is it an anachronism to talk about these artists as part of a postcolonial avant-garde? Did they see themselves at the forefront of that and define their work on the basis of it? - Of course they did. As part of a whole network of artists who were against the colonial status quo and because also unfortunately the colonial state of mind or the colonial infrastructure doesn't stop with independence. In all the countries who became independent at a certain point of history, it took many more years after independence to relocalize and reappropriate all of these cultural tools and platforms and to be reinvented by African and Arab artists. So no, they definitely consider themselves as such and those statements were made public again during the Dakar festival of 1966 at the time of Leo Policé d'Arsangor or the Baghdad Biennale which you mentioned in 1974 were for the first time artists from Syria, from Kuwait, from Iraq, from Algeria, from Morocco will gather together to create an international force against the status quo of the Eastern and Western powers and of course the international exhibition for Palestine in 1978, which the poster we have here exhibited and shows that many even European countries were contributing to this effort. You have an Italian delegation, including Carla Acardi who is this fascinating woman abstract painter from Italy who will become a friend of the Casablanca Arts School and will be even commissioned a mural for one of the hotels in which the integrated decorative panels was actually included in the Palestinian exhibition of '78. So even beyond Arab or African artists per se but also involving Western artists committed to this cause they were self conscious and definitely speaking loud for this commitment against colonial empires and also against the colonial legacy that they all wanted to break from through these solidarity networks. - Marad, I could spend another three hours talking to you and we would only be able to scratch the service of this exhibition. - Thank you ever so much for taking the time to talk to me today. - Thank you so much, it's my pleasure. - I honestly have a hundred questions more but I've considered the way. - The Casablanca Arts School platforms and patterns for a post-colonial avant-garde, 1962 to 1987, runs at the Tate St. Ives in Cornwall until the 14th of January 2024. For more, you can read my article. You'll find all the links in the episode notes. (bright music) Empire Lines is produced by Yelena Sofraniavich. For more episodes, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. (bright music) - So not colonial empire? - Yes, it can be colonial empire like what have been technological empires. - So empire as a metaphor? - Exactly, yes, very important.