Surface Moments, Marrakech: A Photographic Series

Joseph Heathcott

34-41 78th St., Apt. 2J Jackson Heights, NY 11372 United States

5 Atterbury St. Chelsea College of Art London SW1P 4RQ United Kingdom

+44 (0)75 8674 2481 jheathcott@gmail.com

Statement

Joseph Heathcott is a writer, curator, photographer, and educator based in New York. He teaches at The New School where he offers courses in urbanism, critical theory, and the uses of archives. During 2010-2011 he is the U.S. Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of the Arts in London and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. He is a compulsive peripatetic, habitual sun-angle checker, amateur archivist, idiot cartographer, noise maker, and collector of records, post cards, old radios, books, and found objects. His work has appeared in a wide range of formats, including exhibits, magazines, academic publications, radio broadcast, and journals of opinion.

My work examines the urban condition through a range of scales, registers, and media. The primary focus of this work is on the everyday life of cities and the ways in which human creativity shapes urban form and meaning over time. I am interested in how the past haunts the city, and the varied ways in which we accommodate and contest the ruins around us. These passions lead me to search the interstitial spaces, fragile moments, odd corridors, and recombinant environs that best reveal something of the urban. Ultimately, the whole of the city is unattainable, so I look for it through signals, noise, layers, jagged edges, soft wares, connective tissues, ghosts, hoaxes, fetishes, archives, dreams, and buried treasures.

Vitae

Surface Moments, Marrakech

From a distance, Marrakech appears smooth. Renowned as the “Red City,” with its walls aglow from a uniform salmon-pink paint, Marrakech presents as a uniquely coherent signscape. Through its extensive efforts at producing visual regularity in its façades, the city insists that we read it on these terms.

But even a cursory look at the surfaces reveals a tremendous fund of variation, a roiling, bubbling skin, bruised and warted, wounded and repaired, pierced and incised, shaped and appended. Marrakech’s surface records a dynamic practice of marking, signaling, and deriving place. Its walls are a collagraph of materials, fixtures, signs, codes, and patterns that well up and disappear over time, to be replaced by others.

Of course, cities are like that. They display a telescopic complexity, where decreasing scale and increasing resolution reveal new registers of material and meaning. But Marrakech, among all cities, pushes this telescopy to the extreme. From some views at some scales, the city unfolds as a lightly spread blanket of pink. With one small change in position, angle, or elevation, however, we behold a very different reality, marked by a million epidural blemishes, pocks, troughs, gouges, addenda, and accoutrements. The result is a nested series of ever-shifting surfaces in tension.

The photographs included here describe a selection of these tense, dynamic surface moments. The basic aim is to locate material interstices, joints, fissures, and collisions in the city’s walls. These surface moments expose the rich and unstable encounter of ideas, techniques, and practices that shape the everyday Marrakshi built environment. The result is an archive of the ever-appearing and disappearing urban skin.

This is not an attempt to explore some imagined Moroccan interiority or hidden depth. Nor is it an effort to distill some timeless essence of place. Even if depth could be read from surface, the surface of Marrakech is continually changing. Paint deteriorates on the walls and new coats are added. Buildings decompose; some are repaired, some not. Plaster sloughs off and is replaced, or not. Political messages and wry graffiti appear overnight. Thousands of alterations reshape the city’s walls day after day.

Rather, this is a meditation on the construction of place through surface complexity, and the ways in which the fragile envelope of Marrakech’s buildings comprises a topography in constant flux. The photographs, I hope, suggest the intricacy of the shallow and the profundity of the surface, and in so doing, point us toward the creative praxis of place-making in the everyday city.

Berima neighborhood, rooftop view. The pink façades demarcate street-facing walls.

Corner collision of two texture schemes, where smooth abuts rough.

Multicolored grid painted over multitextured wall surface, with electrical box.

Layered materials: wood, brick, ceramic, metal piping, rough stone and smooth plaster.

Door, jamb, wall no. 1.

Door, jamb, wall no. 2.

Appropriation.

No surface wasted. Useful instruction. Place Jemaa al Fna.

Ghostly trace of a demolished home, rendered as a bas-relief on the adjacent building.

Battery of defensive apertures, or remnants of wall timbers, at the Royal Palace.

Lights and cables affixed to wall above passage way.

Post and floor tile, Jardin Majorelle.

Surrounded red.

Detail above the entrance to one of the hundreds of derbs (dead-end residential streets).

Death head etching on exterior wall of a residential building.

Unrestored zellij tiling and wood column, Bahia Palace.

Vase, border, and wall. Jardin Majorelle.

Remnants affixed to steel peg. Thread-winding is a cottage industry in Morocco.

Wooden shutter and window screen, Madrasa Ben Youssef.

Color treatment around electric meter cover.

Brick, plaster, and metal on a residential wall.

Says it all. Latrinalia at the Jardin Majorelle.

The end of pink. Royal Palace.