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Indepth Arts News:
"A Life Full of Holes - The Strait Project: Photographs by Yto Barrada"
2005-02-13 until 2005-04-02
Open Eye Gallery
Liverpool, ,
UK United Kingdom
The word strait, like its French – and as chance would have it, Arabic –
equivalent, combines the senses of narrowness and distress. The collapse of
the colonial entreprise has left behind a complex legacy, bridging the
Mediterranean and shaping how movement across the Strait of Gibraltar is
managed and perceived. Before 1991 any Moroccan with a passport could travel
freely to Europe. But since the European Union’s (EU) Schengen Agreement,
visiting rights have become unilateral across what is now legally a one-way
strait. A generation of Moroccans has grown up facing this troubled space
that manages to be at once physical, symbolic, historical and intimately
personal.
'I thought: people say it's better to have no life at all than a life full
of holes. But then they say: better an empty sack than no sack. I don't
know'.
A Life Full of Holes,Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (1964),
recorded and translated by Paul Bowles
Today the Strait is the main gateway for illegal immigrants, bound north
with their own vocabulary, legends, songs, rites, and language. People no
longer say ‘he migrated’ but ‘h’reg’: ‘he burned’– burned his papers, his
past, the law. Over the past two decades, the Spanish coast, visible from
Tangier on any clear day or night, has lured many thousands of would-be
émigrés to their deaths in what has become a vast Moroccan cemetery. Yet
throughout Africa, the streets are abuzz with the exploits of ‘the burnt
ones’ or ‘the burners’, and Tangier has become the destination and
jumping-off point of a thousand hopes.
I try to expose the metonymic character of the Strait through a series of
images that reveal the tension – that restlessly animates the streets of my
hometown – between its allegorical nature and immediate, harsh reality. My
work attempts, in part, to exorcise the unspoken violence of other people’s
departures. I, too, left Tangier, for more than 10 years; by moving back, I
have placed myself amidst the violence of homecoming. There are no flâneurs
here, and no innocent bystanders.
The subject of this book is never frankly discussed in Morocco. Yet
everywhere I pursued my photographic record of northern ennui – along the
‘Wall of the Lazy’, in the vacant lots and housing projects, around the port
– I came to recognise this fatal drive to leave that is today inscribed in a
whole people.
Yto Barrada
Tangier, 2004
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