Words Emily McDermottImages Daniel LoberVideo Filipe Zapelini

Beyond the bustling souks and ancient Berber, Jewish, and Arabic sites of Morocco lies a pulsating creative community populated by artists and artisans alike.

In workshops bearing memories that are hundreds of years old, expert glass blowers, ceramicists, and metalsmiths carry on traditions passed down over generations. Yet, simultaneously, they challenge the Western separation of art and craft. Tapping into this idea, Further Marrakech: The Artist and the Artisan asked what it means to be an artist or an artisan in the modern world: Are they two distinct categories or two ways of naming the same thing? What happens when such practitioners come together across cultures in the act of creation?

“It was a great exchange, I felt thankful finding a great balance between my eye and theirs.”
Deborah Fischer

During the four-week residency, Fischer was joined by Lena Marie Emrich, Loutfi Souidi, Jessie French, and Lichen Kelp, who lived among La Pause’s earthen constructions and Berber tents and, like Fischer, spent their days experimenting and collaborating with local artisans, artists, and scientists to create works that reflect and engage with the landscape, culture, and craft traditions of Morocco. Further followed their journeys through Marrakech’s souks, workshops, and studios; across the parched hills and eucalyptus-shaded oases of the desert; and into the beating heart of Morocco’s “Red City”—all while coming to better understand it as a crossroads between South, North, East and West, between antiquity and modernity, between the local and the international.

“Marrakech has a very interesting context which nests different realities,” Bouhchichi says. “There is a side which point towards authenticity, towards history, and there is a side which points towards modernity and something we can call 'civilization'. Marrakech is like a laboratory and there is something that excites artists.”

This laboratory, ripe for experimentation, is part of what draws both regional and international artistic perspectives to the city, and what allows artisans to break free of the traditional notions associated with their crafts. Emrich’s supple leather harnesses and copper-framed photographs printed on glass resulted from creative connections with local specialists. With the desire to create copper bottles, for example, she approached a coppersmith who helped her not only fabricate the work but also improve her design, including how to close the bottles. “They [the artisans] were feeling the idea and trying to help me realize it in the very best way,” Emrich says. “They were creating the work with me together.” La Pause Residency founding director Roxane Alaime says that such “dialogue, both artistic and conversational, lays at the heart of the residency’s intent.”

“Dialogue, both artistic and conversational, lays at the heart of the residency’s intent.”
Roxane Alaime

Dialogue lays at the heart of the country, too. Morocco, bordering the Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, Algeria, and Mauritania, has long been known as a meeting point between the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. Today, rapid globalization, a lively tourism industry, and an expanding contemporary art scene magnify the richness of such cross-cultural exchanges. Over 100 international and regional artists have exhibited in the Marrakech Biennial—the first major trilingual festival in North Africa­—since its debut in 2004, while spaces like Voice Gallery showcases artists with socially minded practices year-round. In 2016, the Museum of African Contemporary Art opened its doors, followed in 2018 by the arrival of the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, the leading international art fair dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas.

During Further, the visiting artists found inspiration in everything from a nearly dried-out riverbed in the Agafay Desert to red algae and seaweed unique to the Moroccan coast. They examined traditional Moroccan strawbale homes and sought to understand the value of unfunctional items sold in souks. Their resulting projects were exhibited at Pikala Bikes, where it became clear that the artisans, with whom each of the artists worked, now strive to create more than just utilitarian objects. Local potter Akid Abderrahim is a testament to this thought: “We used to make just normal objects like plates and cups,” he says. “But since I met M’Barek, I’ve been able to make strange things that I didn’t think I could do before.”

People like Abderrahim represent a new generation of creative practitioners whose work blurs the lines often drawn between art and craft. Moreover, Bouhchichi points out that the separation between art and craft is, in and of itself, a Western idea—a colonial legacy and a part of history which the local art scene is trying to correct. “Art and the artistic activity in Morocco have a responsibility towards history, towards the context, towards people,” he says. So, is there really a difference between the artist and the artisan? Souidi sums it up best: “The basis of being an artist is creation. An artist creates, an artisan also creates. If any person creates something beautiful, they are an artist.”

“The basis of being an artist is creation. An artist creates, an artisan also creates. If any person creates something beautiful, they are an artist.”
Loufti Souidi