Yto Barrada


Yto Barrada
The Telephone Books (or the Recipe Books) Fig. 1 to 8, 2010
Color C-print and silver gelatine prints
150 x 120 cm
Edition 5 + 2 A.P.

 

 

 



 

 

 












Iris Tingitana Project, 2007

 

Iris Tingitana Project

IRIS TINGITANA is one of Tangier’s native flowers, and takes its name from the city’s Latin one. The Tingitane peninsula of northern Morocco is a place of great biodiversity, home to the highest concentration of indigenous species on the Mediterrenean. Since long before the Romans, human development has left its traces on this environment without defiing it. Over the past ten years, though, marketplaces, pastures, and formerly protected forests and historic buildings are being handed over to developers of hotels, housing, and shopping malls, in a fast-forward push to replicate the spanish Costa del Sol, a high-density suburban sprawl of mass sunshine tourism. The decisionmakers’ broader goal, conscious or not, is a new, clean, globally marketable Morocco in which the only indigenous species visible in public are those branded by modernity or neatly framed by their folkloric status. Wildflowers, like street kids, men napping in parks, roadside picnickers, farmers selling produce, and clandestine pastoral lovers, will soon have no place. Flowers are wrongly considered inherently poetic. Here they have quietly become political. The overnight appearance in Tangier’s traffic circles of thousands of pink geraniums, in aseasonal full bloom, or the quick march of imported palm trees from the south along the corniche of Tangier speak in botanical code of the new grammar of power. January is also the month in which the local Irises bloom, and this year, in in-between spaces ­ on rutted consruction sites, along incomplete highway spans and in the remaining graveyards and grasslands -- the surviving endangered wild iris, sage, and pines still bore stoic witness to their city’s irreversible transformation.





1
1 1 1
Red Walls - Tangier, 2006




The smugglers belt steps, 2006









Bus - Tangier, 2004


Bus, Yto Barrada, 2003

Teenagers and children often stow away in the undercarriages of tourist buses to cross the Strait. The logos of the bus companies function as ideograms in the code of illicit travellers, many of whom cannot read. Here, two boys with experience in the port describe various attributes of the bus lines:
Figure 1 « French with Moroccan plates. Migrants from Italy, Spain, France. Parked in front of the port near the ticket booth. 4 AM arrival in Tangier, 6 PM departure. Bring biscuits and dates, and plastic bag for shoes. They notice in Spain right away if your shoes are not clean. Bus goes onto Bismillah ferry, room for three small people under the bus. »
Fig.2 « To Barcelona. Sometimes Egyptians are on the bus, not only Nazarenes. It only comes in summer.The guards are paid well and they change three times: one in the morning, one afternoon and one all night. They are always old. They have a television set. Room for two hiding places, one in front and one in the back. »
Fig. 3 « Portugal bus goes direct, no stop. Nazarenes, old and young. Parked in front of the shrimp factory. One guard, but since he’s in charge of the whole area, he can’t check everything all the time. Climb in the middle of the planchas. Those who have papers go inside the bus. »

 

 





Morocco Iris Wood Puzzle, 2010











"Papiers pliés", 2007
"Papiers pliés. Documents d’usine textile recyclés en cornets de pois-chiche, cacachuètes et graines de tournesol. Objets trouvés dans le Jardin Perdicaris, Tanger", 2007




y12
Tectonic Plate, 2010




palm
Palm Sign, 2010




Lyautey Unit Blocks, 2010




Gran Royal Turismo, 2003


Playground, 2010




 
Beau Geste, 2009