For Yto Barrada, photography and film are primary means to focus on traces and transformations of history within her immediate environment [3], particularly on the devices—practical and psychological—through which individuals negotiate the unlivable transitions of contemporary geopolitics. Portraits, everyday scenes, and landscapes where she detects traces of forgotten events combine significant details of displaced lives, gestures toward elsewhere, and environmental mutations. This approach is neither ethnographic nor purely documentary. She works in the tension between snapshot and allegory, free from pathos and any assertive or dogmatic discourse, challenging the univocal visions conveyed by the press.

This concern for ordinary resistance has led Barrada to invest in and amplify certain gestures of everyday and domestic life. Her photographs of botanical gardens correspond to an engagement with urban life, as evidenced by Beau Geste (2009), in which she films a “botanical commando” saving a palm tree poisoned by a property owner [4]. Since 2017, this interest has extended to plant-based weavings and dyes, from which she composes patchworks that openly display their handcrafted nature. Some humorously transpose the precise modernist abstractions of Frank Stella—himself inspired by colors from his travels to Morocco. In doing so, Barrada fosters a reciprocal dialogue between international avant-garde and local craft.

Each project is based on investigation and produces a constellation of practices: sculptures, often in the shape of models, toys, or samples; assemblages and installations; and, of course, films, photographs, posters, publications, and performances—most recently addressing the 1960 Agadir earthquake [5]. Film plays various roles: often revealing archives and facts, but also acting as quirky explanatory manuals. The exhibition borrows from natural history museums or diorama models—places of visual learning or knowledge formation. She also produced a singular research project on ethnographer Thérèse Rivière in 2016 [6]. Barrada’s gesture was is one of passing the baton backward through time, disciplines, and museum hierarchies, offering a “supplement” of life to hidden or forgotten traces. In the animated film Tree Identification for Beginners (2017), elements from Montessori games and other educational materials perform ballets in stop-motion. But the music that accompanies these movements is drawn from readings aloud of texts related to Operation Crossroads Africa [7], in which the artist’s mother participated in the 1960s, providing a critical and humorous narrative. When drawing on family memories, Barrada adopts the model of “hand-me-downs,” referring to secondhand clothing passed down through generations. In 2006, she gave this title to an archival montage film on transmission, layering anonymous home movies with her own family stories, which she narrated in the first person. This mode of reprise regenerates a past blocked by taboos, suspended between forgetting, storytelling, and the patching together of memory.
The artist claims a plurality of cultures and influences. Her practice—through assemblage, montage, appropriation, and deconstruction of diverse materials—reflects a geographic and cultural dislocation marked by displacement, dispossession, and rupture. She opens pathways into the blind spots of grand narratives, revealing the politics of visibility.

Marie Muracciole, 2020
Translated by Laurie Hurwitz

[1] Yto Barrada, Anaïs Masson, Maxence Rifflet, Fais un fil et jette-le à la mer (Marseille; Tangier: Sujet/Objet), 2003.

[2] Yto Barrada, A Life Full of Holes / The Strait Project (London: Autograph ABP, 2003).

[3] Tangier’s position on the Strait of Gibraltar—famous for the myth of Hercules fighting Antaeus—places it within a mythology of both separation and encounter between cultures. Since the Schengen Agreement came into effect in 1990, this former international city has become a gateway to Europe for thousands of undocumented migrants, asylum seekers, and emigrants. This marks the beginning of a widespread exodus, fueled by repression and wars, that continues to profoundly impact the Mediterranean and Europe today.

 
[4] In Tangier, any real estate operation that involves cutting down trees is prohibited by law.

[5] Yto Barrada: Agadir, Barbican Centre, The Curve, London, February 7–May 20, 2018.

[6] In 2016, Barrada explored and photographed notebooks, drawings, and photographs in the Quai Branly Museum archives, created by the sister of George Henri Rivière (founder of the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions), documenting her 1930s travels in the Aurès Mountains, Algeria. A collaborator of Germaine Tillion, she focused on magic, women, rites and games, and children’s drawings before being forcibly institutionalized. Barrada’s Objets indociles: Supplément à la vie de Thérèse Rivière [Disobedient Objects: Supplement to the Life of Thérèse Rivière] was produced for the Marcel Duchamp Prize at the Centre Pompidou in 2016.

[7] Founded in 1958 by a Presbyterian pastor, Operation Crossroads Africa was established to foster educational exchanges between Africa and the United States. Barrada’s mother, Mounira Bouzid, notably participated, insisting on being treated according to the program’s guidelines and boycotting activities she found objectionable.