October 14, 2022
Editorial Note
The Yto Barrada retrospective Bad Color Combos at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam runs from October 22, 2022 to March 5, 2023. It presents work selected from the last five years of her practice, in a variety of media, including textile, video, sculpture, and photography. In preparation for the exhibition, in June this year curator Leontine Coelewij travelled to Tangier, the city where the artist grew up.
Yto Barrada was born in Paris, 1971, grew up in Morocco, studied history and political science at the Sorbonne, Paris, and photography in New York. She was involved in the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut (late 1990’s) and co-founded Tangier’s Cinémathèque in 2006, North Africa’s first combined arthouse cinema and film archive. It remains to this day an important cultural hub for the city. She has exhibited her work worldwide and received many prizes, most recently the Queen Sonja Print Award (Norway). Yto Barrada lives and works between New York and Tangier.
In recent years, Yto Barrada has developed a new series of works around themes such as the acceleration and deceleration of time, motherhood, the history of education and play, the artisanry of natural dyes and color as material, traditions of modernism, and our futile attempts to control nature.
Portrait of Yto Barrrada taken by Leontine Coelewij.
With the support of ArtAngel, the artist has set up a new project in Tangier called The Mothership: a garden filled with the plants and flowers that produce the dyes she uses in many of her artworks. Barrada has been working with natural dyes for a number of years.
Yto Barrada, The Mothership, Tangier, Dye House, June 2022. Photos by Leontine Coelewij.
The garden is situated at an extraordinary location, on a mountain on the west side of Tangier with a view of the Strait of Gibraltar and the southern tip of Spain. The plot of land includes a summerhouse that was built in the 1920s where Barrada lives some months of the year (the rest of the time she lives and works in New York), and the flower and vegetable gardens. In the Dye House of The Mothership, Barrada hosts workshops and welcomes children to conduct experiments using plants and insects to produce the dyes for her textile pieces. In June, four textile conservators from France did a residency at The Mothership preparing natural colors for dyeing cotton, linen, satin, and silk fabrics.
Yto Barrada. The Mothership, Tangier. Residency. June 2022. Photos by Leontine Coelewij.
The artist named the new project The Mothership for several reasons. One is the association it invokes with Afrofuturism, the speculative fiction genre through which Black thinkers, practitioners, and writers imagine a new and Afrocentric future. The name is also a reference to motherhood, the passing of knowledge from mother to daughter, and other aspects of growing up, learning, and playing. The Mothership is also a gathering place for artists, gardeners, thinkers, and makers of all sorts.
Color is central to Yto Barrada’s work and to this garden. Close to the Dye House hang two banners printed with the words “Color Walks.” William Burroughs, who lived in Tangier for many years, came up with the idea of the color walk as a way of picking a route through the city: by taking a specific color as your guide, you become more attentive and alert to sights you would otherwise miss.
Yto Barrada. The Mothership, Tangier. Garden. June 2022. Photos by Leontine Coelewij.
Color can also be a measure of time. The notions of acceleration and deceleration are important to Barrada’s work. Her exhibition at the Stedelijk includes the work The Power of Two or Three Suns, a video shot in a laboratory where she could measure the impact of weathering such as sunlight on various materials. In the film, we see pieces of colored textile being exposed to the rays of an artificial sun. This work evokes the increasing changes to the climate we are experiencing: the rising temperature on earth, the periods of drought, and the contrasting extremes in rainfall. Yto Barrada: “After the fires and drought we experienced this year, we decided to accelerate making this place a sanctuary for artists, with space and time to address radical change.”
Since June, some seasonal projects took place: flowers were harvested and dried, a worm-composting system was built, the wells and the old dye house were repaired. Furthermore, many artists came to visit and work at The Mothership, including Thalia Bajon-Bouzid, Alice Coppola, Raphaëlle Déjean, Nourredine Ezzeraf, Laila Gohar, Agathe Strouk, Audrey Snyder, Joe Riley, Isa Rodrigues, and Alice Vrinat.
Yto Barrada, The Mothership, Tangier, Dye House, June 2022. Photos by Leontine Coelewij.
Learn more about the exhibition’s inspirations and intentions in conversation with the artist
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