Carlos Perez Marin

   The first time I heard the name Abdeljalil Saouli was in 2012. At that time, I was still teaching at the National School of Architecture of Tetouan (ENAT). Coming to Tetouan twice a week and having organised a workshop for Younès Rahmoun's students from the National Institute of Beat-Arts (INBA), in the same city, led me to occasionally go see their work or simply visit Younès at the INBA. In July 2012, he insisted me to come and see the final projects of some students that he found very interesting. Most of them were indoors, but one young man had decided to show his outside, in the garden, since he came from the countryside and worked with materials he collected from nature. I would have liked to meet him, but he had already returned home after receiving his diploma.

   A year later, I organised workshops in the oasis of Tighmert (Guelmim), Warsha Sahara, for students and young professionals in the fields of art and architecture. When I asked Younès if there were any of his students who might be interested, he quickly told me about this young artist whose work he had shown me in the INBA garden, Abdeljalil Saouli. The idea of coming to an oasis, where nature was also present, appealed to him; it was the message he had sent me while we were leading the first workshop. Despite the cancellations of other participants at the last minute, I had decided to stay in Tighmert even though we were only going to have one artist. The day he was supposed to arrive, he called me to tell me that his mother had fallen seriously ill and that he was going to stay with her in the village. However, he explained to me that one day he would love to come and discover the palm grove.

   In May 2015, after floods surrounded the oasis for two weeks, my friends Ahmed Dabah and Bouchra Boudali called me to suggest the organisation of a festive event with them. A few months later, in July, to raise the spirits of the oasis population, the first edition of Caravane Tighmert took place. We invited our artist friends to come and spend a week with the oasis residents, holding workshops and conducting research. This was an opportunity for Abdeljalil to finally visit Tighmert, which he did in 2015 and the following year.

   Since the second edition of Caravane Tighmert (2016), Abdeljalil had been insisting that I spend a few days at his home in Moulay Bouchta al-Khamar (Taounate province, in Morocco), where he was building his house. He wanted to show me and consult some construction details whose technical feasibility he was not sure enough about. In January 2018, taking advantage of the fact that I had a few days between my participation in an event in Fez and the start of my workshop at the INBA, I spent three days visiting him. To be honest, it was a shock, because the way he built it and the technical solutions he applied without been architect.

   Before leaving, Abdeljalil offered me a glass of tea by the el-Wargha dam where he often came to relax. Moreover, the café was on the road I had to take to leave for Tetouan. As we said goodbye, I saw on a distant mountain the profile of something that looked like a rampart. Abdeljalil explained to me that it was not an optical illusion of a geological formation but that they were indeed the ramparts of a fortification from the Almoravid era and that we could go up right away. I couldn't because I didn't want to drive late at night. I had to drive along a country road, with quite a few bends and in the middle of the night, but now I had another (and very strong) reason to return to Moulay Bouchta.

   In April 2017, I received a message from Gilles Aubry, a Swiss sound artist who wanted to know more about Caravane Tighmert. Based on a conversation he had with a mutual friend, Lina Laraki (who had participated in 2016). He thought the oasis could be useful for his research and suggested a video conference to explain his ideas to me.

   He was working on women's songs during their work in several regions of Morocco. In a way, he was expanding on the research conducted by American musician and writer Paul Bowles (thanks to a Rockefeller Foundation grant) in the 1950s throughout Morocco, including Guelmim. In fact, Gilles explained to me that he had already been to Guelmim and had been able to interview the relatives of the musicians Paul Bowles had recorded for his work, Music of Morocco.

   For us, Caravane Tighmert, this was an opportunity to help someone who already knew the region's culture, which is still not easy, even with Moroccan artists who come to Tighmert. The only question was that he wanted to come as soon as possible. Since we were already going to welcome the artist Heidi Vogels to the oasis in May, I suggested he join us, which he gladly did. Once in Tighmert, and thanks to the strategy proposed by Ahmed Dabah, Gilles was able to work with a group of women harvesting wheat in Asrir (close to Tighmert), in collaboration with Heidi (who had come with a 16mm camera). Given the availability and reception from Ahmed, but also from the population of Tighmert (and Asrir) who were beginning to get used to the presence of contemporary artists and their questions on cultural aspects, Gilles decided to participate two months later in the third edition of Caravane Tighmert, where he continued his research and artistic production in tandem with Heidi Vogels. The performance they made for the inhabitants of the oasis, on the former site of the souk el-Khamis, was a demonstration that contemporary culture is not limited to a group of intellectuals but can encompass the whole of society.

   In fact, the best moment of the whole “festival” was the “dress rehearsal” that Gilles and Heidi did for the women who participated in the recording in May, in the Dabah family living room, and understood the exchange we had with them.

   This experience and his willingness to collaborate with many young Moroccan artists (which he did subsequently as we can read on the publication of his doctoral thesis Swat, Bodies, Species Sonic Pluralism in Morocco or on this compilation of his works made by the site specialized in culture around sound, norient) greatly facilitated the speed with which we reached an agreement when we met in September 2018 at Abdeljalil's, in Moulay Bouchta. It was almost obvious that something would come out of this stay, given all the affinities that the three of us had.

   In May 2016, Younès Rahmoun asked me to come to Rabat to help him install a piece that was part of an exhibition dedicated to Faouzi Laatiris (and his disciples) at the Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. It was the exhibition VOLUMEN FUGITIFS.

   Upon arriving at the museum, I greeted several friends who were participating in the exhibition: Mustapha Akrim, Mohamed Arejdal, Khalid Bastrioui, Safâa Erruas, Mohssin Harraki, Mohamed Larbi Rahali, Etayeb Nadif, Younès Rahmoun, and Batoul Shimi. Of course, there was Faouzi Laatiris, whom I hadn't seen since our last conversations about the house-studio project I was working on for him and his wife, Batoul. When I gave him a hug, he was with the museum director and the two curators, Morad Montazami and Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa, the latter responsible for the museum's cultural programming. I noticed a certain curiosity on their faces, since I was a foreigner who was friend with all the artists who were exhibiting. A day later, I realised that Morad and Fatima-Zahra had already heard of me and the first edition of Caravane Tighmert, which had taken place a year earlier. During the hours of waiting and resting while the last works were being installed, Fatima-Zahra took the opportunity to ask me questions about my relationship with the artists and my activities in Morocco. In turn, I questioned her about the birth of the museum (inaugurated in October 2014), about the upcoming program, about the positioning in art in Morocco and, more specifically, about its possible role in revitalising the contemporary and independent art scene. Indeed, we had a lot of hope for this new museum, especially since it organised exhibitions as interesting as that of Faouzi Laatiris, based on research conducted by the curators and which also showed the importance of the National Institute of Fine Arts of Tetouan (INBA), an institution that had, in a certain way, been sidelined in the history of Moroccan art. The exhibition and the book dedicated to it allowed us to put the INBA back in its place in the history of Morocco. For this reason, I wanted to know more about the people who made this possible.

   Later, I learned that Fatima-Zahra was a specialist on the Casablanca School, and that her research on the INBA had given her a more comprehensive view of art in Morocco since independence. The Protectorate had created a cultural divide, still perceptible today in many areas, with the Spanish in the north and the French in the south, to the point that the documents and archives of each colonial administration are not normally consulted by researchers unless they were written in their own language. In short, meeting Fatima-Zahra was a wonderful surprise, and I thought that perhaps she could heal the wound inflicted during the Protectorate, to which the country's centralism had subsequently contributed for decades.

   From then on, every visit to Rabat was an opportunity to have coffee with her and continue our conversations about different ways of developing art and culture.

   When we were talking in September 2018 in Moulay Bouchta with Abdeljalil and Gilles about the people we were going to invite, we were wondering who might want to get involved with us in thinking about and writing the project for the following editions. However, we didn't just want to commission a text, we needed someone open enough not to approach traditional models of cultural creation, most of which in Morocco are determined by funding from European institutions, and above all we wanted a global mentality in the sense of being able to insert the project into a complete Moroccan dimension and not a fragmented one; the north, the center, the south; the Spanish protectorate, the French protectorate; the city, the countryside... Moreover, in the same way that in Tighmert we had decided that we were going to create our own model (even without financial support), we agreed to do the same in Moulay Bouchta with Sakhra. We had drawn up a list, for which I had suggested Fatima-Zahra and also Maud Houssais, who had participated in the book Volume Fugitifs. Ultimately, Fatima-Zahra agreed, and Maud apologised as she couldn't make it at that time.

   During the event, we had quite a few conversations, prioritising artistic creation and the promotion of art and arts education in rural areas, untouched by cultural policies (which are more developed in large cities). Of course, we found ourselves, in part, confronted with the habits of academic research and analysis and the art market, but if the goal was to convince her to join us, the gamble paid off.

Credits texts, photos and drawings: Carlos Pérez Marín