The Smuggler

This film by French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada observes the elaborate fossil industry in Morocco. Paying homage to the 'preparators' in the arid region between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert, whose intrepid work is fueling a thriving trade in artifacts real, faux and hybrid, False Start is a rebuke to the fetishistic thirst for foreign objects, a sly meditation on authenticity, and a paean to creativity.

Wrestling with writer’s block for her first film, Bouchra, a queer Moroccan jackal living in NYC, starts having difficult yet overdue phone calls with her mother in Casablanca that begin influencing the project. Balancing the precarity of working as an artist, the rift in her cultural identity and an array of romantic interests, Bouchra’s emotional reckoning becomes her path to expression.

In 2003, Barrada presented a table-sized automated model Gran Royal Turismo based on a road racing set. A convoy of three black Mercedes emerges from a tunnel and just before they arrive at the town, palm trees push out of the ground, the sidewalks and walls flip over to reveal clean freshly painted surfaces, flags blossom along the route. It seems to be like a Potemkin Village display – perhaps for the benefit of a visiting head of state.

Drawing together footage, photographs and texts from archival sources as well as the artist’s personal collection of materials, Yto Barrada’s new film is as much a poetic enigma as it is a portrait of identity. Ether Reveries (Suite for Thérèse Rivière no.2) takes as its starting point the work and life of Thérèse Rivière (1901–1970), a French anthropologist whose remarkable working life was cut short following her confinement in psychiatric institutions.

Barrada turns her lens to two “weather acceleration” facilities in Miami and Phoenix dedicated to testing the durability of consumer products. Moving between the two laboratories and their surrounding landscapes, Barrada signals the visible consequences of natural and manmade environmental distress. She entwines a specialized visual vocabulary of age and decay with an exploration of motherhood, inheritance, and subjectivity.

Industrial testing laboratories simulate exposure to the elements—solar radiation, wind, rain, salt, heavy storms, fog, heat—in order to weather-test products and materials: plastics, coatings, automotive parts, paints, textiles… Accelerated weathering tests re-create real-world conditions in a condensed time frame, to test future durability to fading and corrosion. The two main means of testing materials are outdoor exposure racks and accelerated laboratory chambers. The xenon lamps used in sunlight weathering machines are said to have the power of two or three suns.

In the turbulent summer of 1966, the artist’s mother, a 20-year-old Moroccan student-socialist, was one of some 50 'Young African Leaders' invited on a State Department-sponsored propaganda tour of the USA. In this film, Barrada interweaves events of political history with her own family stories and myths. These 'sediments of history' come together here through archives, reports, and journals. The colourful, abstract 16mm stop-motion animation was made with the educational tools that are used for Montessori education.

This film is devoted to one extraordinary Moroccan woman's story. In it she confronts her family and their servants about the relationships between them, and what these relationships may reveal about Moroccan society, and her own life.