Hassan Darsi is a Moroccan artist, unclassifiable, obsessed with public space. The exhibition, Poem, dedicated to him in Casablanca, is an opportunity to discover the unique approach of a visual poet who has been concerned for thirty years with transforming ruins into projects and alerting us to the political disasters that we barely perceive. As an engaged aesthete in the city, following the romantic poet Shelley, he knows that "poets are the unrecognized legislators of the world"[1], that they can only repair it through creation, unable to change the laws of reproduction.
Hassan Darsi has the art of listening, head tilted, eyes draped. He has a body that is both calm and alert, allowing him to bounce back, instinctively, as if seized by an urgency, to ask you to go further, to say more, to dig deep into your uncertainties to better confront the thing that matters to you. He knows, evidently, that only maieutics allows access to the truth that lies within each of us, that it is not innate knowledge but diffuse awareness.
The Poetic and the Political
Poem, an English word without an accent and without an e, as if to say without embellishments, is the title chosen for his latest exhibition. Why Poem? To the spontaneous question, this unclassifiable multidisciplinary visual artist responds with a quip. "Because you don't expect it." Indeed, in the beautiful space, Artorium in Casablanca, visitors can wander among sharp, unique, unexpected artistic proposals that he has developed over the past five years, and it is not the word poetry that they would think of first.
They would tend to naturally associate him with an art practitioner in tension with public space. And if some were to detect the poetry lurking behind his posture, they would then be invited to redefine its meaning. For him, as for the curator Abdellah Karroum who accompanies him, Poem is not just a form of expression or merely a formal composition. It is rather a position of balance, of "just distance" between the city and the workshop, between the disasters produced by politics and the possibility of reconciliation offered by the artistic gesture. Ultimately, poetry would reside for him in the ability to "transform ruins into projects."
The Model Maker of Abandoned Spaces
Before looking more closely at the pieces exhibited on this occasion, let us revisit the creative trajectory of this artist-citizen, who has regularly, for thirty years, been attracted, in advance of his projects, by the phenomena of abandonment, loss, and chaos that presented themselves to his gaze and stirred his conscience in his living spaces.
The founding act of this approach, likened to "an anti-disaster museology,"[2] was the project for the model of the (abandoned) Hermitage Park. Having discovered this place in 2001, spanning 17 hectares, littered with debris, bypassed, forgotten, he began a tedious work of surveying, measuring, and systematic recording to produce a model at a scale of 1/100, which served both as a device to gather citizens around a neglected public space and as an emblematic work of contemporary anti-monumental vision, later acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Often, Darsi has had, as a concerned artist, the desire to give meaning to his approach by seeking the form that suits the chaos he is accidentally confronted with. This was again the case with the Square down below, an industrial, colonial building, abandoned, which he discovered in 2009. Having moved his workspace and exchange space, La Source du Lion on the 6th floor of a building on Avenue Mers Sultan, he discovered across from him the old Légal & Frères furniture factory, in ruins. Another model was born from this.
An Ecological Art
By behaving like a perceptual (non-conceptual) researcher, Darsi borrows some techniques from geologists and geographers, such as sampling, reproduction, and scaling. His constant concern is to reveal unresolved enigmas and paradoxes that he lays bare. The same goes for the locality, Beni Aïssi, where he now lives and works next to Benslimane, from which the project Kariyati Hayati (My Village, My Life) was born in 2017.
In an ecological, situated approach, he collaborates with his neighbors to form a collective resistance against a sand quarry project threatening to destroy the entire surrounding ecosystem. From this emerged not only an exhibition and a film but also joint initiatives for alternative agriculture and solidarity restoration.
In addition to preserving a neighboring forest, he has succeeded in placing culture, in the botanical sense, at the heart of people's lives. Each time, Darsi engages in a new "political practice of art"[3], without ever falling into the trap of political art. To do this, he adopts the humble attitude of one who seeks to learn from the people who live in the spaces and experience the places of distress. After which, he seeks to translate this set of signals captured through a creative act.
Deconstructing the Art Exhibition
To remain coherent to the end, Darsi exposes himself very little, and when he resolves to do so, one must often expect a twist. He has already locked himself in with friends in a double-locked glass structure, served drinks, and let the public watch them from the outside like circus animals. As he has, another time, in the momentum of an ironic work on gilding, as a symbol of luxury and fake, draped the entire facade of the workshop that welcomed him in gold leaves. This time, in the desired sobriety for Poem, he contented himself with welcoming visitors with an exhibition of natural plants and a stamp allowing him to print for each person, as if by an administrative gesture, an invitation to deconstruction. He says no more and leaves everyone the freedom to interpret this instruction according to their sensitivity.
The visitor is immediately captivated by a large circular series, with tiny raised cubes, bearing the name "uprisings," also known as Intifada, in black, red, and green, as a subtle double reference to Palestine. On the opposite wall, vestiges impose themselves in mirror, like in negative, reproducing the printed traces on a white background. And then, as if to take a step aside, a fourth intifada with golden cubes. If their unevenness reminds one, like in a compact crowd, of popular uprisings, the vestiges opposite attenuate their force, revealing their dispersion and weakening. It is not about elaborating on an explanation of the work, which imposes itself by itself, but about signifying the poetic ingenuity by which this double form, put in tension and dialogue, allows, as often in Darsi's work, to highlight a paradox.
As a passionate model maker, Darsi shows further the gauge by which he constructs his fragile architectures in superimposed amulets. But here too, the goal is not merely aesthetic, as often in contemporary art, to reveal the back of the stage. His aim is to add to the wooden structure that underpins his creations, words, and thus a language (not wooden) that allows for maintaining a certain form of ethical vigilance regarding a world that is decomposing. In the flow, he invites one to see translucent architectural structures, themselves reflections of visual transformations of our cities. But, as if by a mirage effect, he embeds a map of Africa that eludes the gaze and reappears with a simple shift of the body. As if Africa were both absent and present, thought and ignored, plundered and adored.
Often, his heightened awareness of "the imminence of danger that awaits us," to borrow Walter Benjamin's phrase, guides his artistic explorations. His goal, in inviting us to an art space, is not so much to expose himself as to expose us to what he has been able to shape as problems and latent sources of tension. As if he were seeking to reveal, with the distance that aesthetics allows, a latent morbidity or a threatened liveliness. His aim, somewhat playful, joyful, and melancholic at the same time, is to make us grasp the acuity of what suddenly presents itself to be seen differently.
Driss Ksikes is a writer, playwright, researcher in media and culture, and associate dean for research and academic innovation at HEM (private university in Morocco).
[1]Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry" in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Edward Moxon, London, 1840.
[2] Katarzina Pierpzak, "Muséologies anti-désastre, in La Source du lion de 1 à Z : De l'art au Maroc. 1995-2022, SDL
[3] Michel Gauthier, « Portrait de l’artiste en hétérotopologue », in Hassan Darsi, l’action et l’œuvre en projet, Ed. Le Fennec, 2011
Cover photo: The exhibition Poem, organized by the TGCC Foundation, is held at the Artorium art space in Casablanca until July 31 © DR