In her solo show DEADHEAD at Fondazione Merz in Turin, Yto Barrada continues disrupting linear colonial and capitalist notions of time.
On Instagram, Yto Barrada calls herself “Flower Thief”. It’s a likely reference to her second nonprofit – after the arthouse, Cinémathèque de Tanger – called The Mothership, an artist residence, retreat and dye garden hosted in Barrada’s home in Tangier. Gardeners, dyers, writers, artists and researchers can congregate there and create. As collaborators, they learn to practice cultivating natural dyes, indigenous methods and community making, with Barrada as instigator. In a Tate video from last summer entitled Enter the Mothership, languorous shots of the French-Moroccan artist show her steeping fabric in a bath of indigo (“Stay underwater”, she coaxes it), observing stitching techniques amid local women, surveying racks of dried flowers and reciting a dyeing recipe that begins with “Gather the leaves or flower heads…”
DEADHEAD is Barrada’s latest solo exhibition, currently showing at Fondazione Merz in Turin. The title refers to the practice of removing dead or old flower- and seedheads in order to nurture plant health. Curators Davide Quadrio and Giulia Turconi build the metaphor in the wall text, stating how Barrada “steals rituals…to compose a headless body of work”. I am initially unsure what this means, yet am reminded of Emily Dickinson’s quote on appraising good poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
Image courtesy of Fondazione Merz
DEADHEAD presents select works from two decades of Barrada’s practice, carefully spanning her many methods and materials, which include photography, sculpture, painting, dyeing, collage, textiles, film, engraving and text. At first it is not apparent what unites the works in this space, but as I walk through the show I begin to see them as their own contained garden; what a garden demands is not total control or comprehension, but a surrendering to time, to its unpredictable, contrapuntal mischiefs.
Barrada was born in Paris, grew up mostly in Tangier, and is now based between the Moroccan port city and New York. Next year, she will represent France at the Venice Biennale. This triangulation of geographies is heavily storied, especially within Barrada’s own career – much of which has become canonised within the fields of postcolonial and migration studies. Her first photographic series, A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project, examined the Strait of Gibraltar, flowing between Morocco and Europe, in the aftermath of colonialism and the 1991 Schengen Agreement. These waters, once a supposed symbol of freedom and movement, are now gravesites; thousands of migrants perish on their way to former colonisers and other European elsewheres, in search of some security.
Image courtesy of the artist
In the centre of the first room of DEADHEAD is a mammoth installation called Lit-Ras-D’Eau I (Raft I) (2023), which is both a life raft and antique bed. The bed balances precariously on welded barrels, nearly toppling over, while thick ropes extend to the floor, unanchored. What is most striking is the overbearing fabric hanging down from above: simple white billowing cloth with imperfect blood-red stripes. I walk round and round the work and its stripping down of a flag, that could be American or British or French, to its bones – it does feel as if the top of my head has been taken off a bit. In Lit-Ras-D’Eau, I find an element of revenge. The tedious Schengen visa application that even brought me to Turin swims in my mind. Thousands of appointments, stamps and the disgusting excess of printed papers I have always used to validate myself tighten my chest. Yet the constrained cosmopolitanism of my life does not even begin to fathom a refugee’s experience, wading into water for another land.
The exhibition’s second room reverberates similarly. The walls here are painted halfway up in blue to mimic sea levels. Barrada’s Land and Water Forms series (2019) show soft minimalist renderings of gulfs, peninsulas, archipelagos and the like, with the water more foregrounded and the land like an afterthought – to me, a beautiful nod to the worldview that is tidalectics, which theorises from the ocean as its centre. Yet Barrada’s engagement with water is also necessarily ecocritical. After the Parade (2019) is a dark blue cardboard children’s costume shaped like ocean waves, found abandoned after a New York climate protest. I note the holes cut out of the “waves”, perhaps an ode to A Life Full of Holes. At the back of the room, there is the arresting installation Tangier Island’s Wall (2022), comprising stacked white crab traps. The work “reflects on the parallel fates of two Tangiers… Barrada’s hometown [and its aspiring migrants] and Tangier Island in Virginia, threatened by rising sea levels,” says the exhibition text. My only wish would be for this information to be more immediately accessible, as it significantly enriches the work’s concept.
Image courtesy of the artist
There are several other entry points for approaching DEADHEAD. Parts of the exhibition are invested in the “materiality of colour”, especially in response to the 1902 book Color Problems by Emily Vanderpoel. Barrada’s longtime fascination with education and schooling, as well as childhood, are prominent. Some works are even made in conjunction with, or for, her daughter. The 2017 film Tree Identification for Beginners exclusively shows Montessori toys with quirky sound effects, while the voiceover recounts the experiences of Barrada’s mother as part of Operation Crossroads Africa in 1966. A group of young Africans travelled through the United States to “learn from the culture”, against the backdrop of radical countercultural and activist movements. Here, personal and public archives collide with political pasts, propositions and futurities.
The Malaysian scholar Pheng Cheah has written that while colonialism and capitalist globalisation have come to ‘include’ more people outside the West, this has happened by “tethering them to Western modernity’s unrelenting march of progress and capitalist time”. Think of the world map’s spatial arrangement, its centre of gravity being Greenwich Mean Time. Think of American neocolonialism, where domination takes place through consumerism, and the drive to profit and optimise at the expense of our bodies and the climate. All this has resulted in the violent destruction of non-Western temporalities – physically, environmentally, spiritually, politically, economically and psychologically.
Barrada’s intervention lies here, in her deliberate yielding to natural cycles of growth and decay, to indigenous methodologies, to weathering and dyes and undefined timelines. When she says “I’m interested in making colour” at the exhibition’s opening, it is the word “making” that glimmers. The continuum of the verb, the stretch of labour that it implies, underline the impulse behind DEADHEAD and Barrada’s practice as a remaking of time.
