Dar Bellarj

Le droit à la ville se manifeste comme forme supérieure des droits : droit à la liberté, à l’individualisation dans la socialisation, à l’habitat et à l’habiter. Le droit à l’œuvre (à l’activité participative) et le droit à l’appropriation (bien distinct du droit à la propriété) s’impliquent dans le droit à la ville. 

Henry Lebfevre (1968)

Throughout the former editions of Ch[a]rita / السِّيس, the public space has been both our place of intervention and our main subject of reflection. For this new edition we decided to reflect on the public space, its functionality, flexibility and how it might display or hold artistic interventions as forms of political acts.

 

Our entry point is a research around the mechanisms of alienation, highly present and visible in the urban sphere. How can we resist the systemic forces that keep severing collective memory and erasing our capacities to imagine otherwise? How can we face capitalist modes of production founded on the depletion of natural resources? How can we rehabilitate collective social architectures while facing the disappearance of communal sentiments, triggered by chaotic urban planning, material exclusion and exotification?  

Within the multifaceted, neoliberal remaking of our contemporary world, the many attempts to reappropriate and reclaim space (whether public or private, urban or rural, tangible or intangible) appear as the first reflecting surface of resistance.

 

Mirroring this, in 2023 Ch[a]rita / السِّيس aims at re/creating new spaces of resilience and regrounding in and with the “public” space during two weeks, hoping to foster public debate & conversations, nourished by screenings, performances, urban interventions & installation spread across Marrakech. 

 

Drawing from the “right to the city” as articulated by Henri Lefebvre, Ch[a]rita / السِّيس expands on last year’s preparatory edition by inviting artists and researchers Islam Shabana, Mati Jhurry, Nabil Himich, Othmane Ouallal, Oumaima Abaraghe & Yara Dowani to further develop their projects and practice, sustaining the production of new works through an artistic residency and a final restitution to the public.   

 

Through a diversity of modalities, forms and approaches, this constellation of artists interrogates the plasticity and symbolism of spaces and acts turning them into playgrounds to experiment with utopias, to question aesthetic and social concerns, exploring our stories and reinventing our futures. Gestures of resilience and modes of appropriation observed within the localities they inhabit become the raw material for interventions that, translated into new languages, are transcribed in the urban fabric as newly formed spaces of conviviality and reflection, remembering and imagining. 

 

As fragile and temporary, as seductive and trickery, these sites of resistance are somewhat glitchy images, a fata morgana appearing and suddenly disappearing within a neutralised urban geography mediated by the subjective landscapes of the artists’ memories and fantasies. 

In this proceeding, if art is yet another (distorted) form of narrating worlds, this Ch[a]rita / السِّيس invites you to follow the artists’s fairies, phantoms and djinns in their games and across the many mirages they offer to unravel.

​