6. March. part II
a scenography for an exhibition. part two
During my stay in Tighmert and Marrakech I continued to develop the plans for the exhibition. The list of artists and their works was becoming more clear but in some cases it was not just about hanging a work on a wall or placing it on the floor but about how to show an electronic device or a set of works, which needed the construction of a display, in a space with a lot of conditions and very small. I had to propose where and how these works could be shown and fortunately most of those works were from friends and I could work directly with them, once the team had given it the go-ahead.
Nonetheless I was very worried about one aspect. I always considered very important to turn the windows holes that had been blinded into exhibition spaces where we could show videos with sound to be watched from the courtyard, avoiding problems of overlapping sounds inside. I had asked Lydia several times the right dimensions of those holes so I could properly draw the situation of the tv screens, objets and pictures inside; she always told me she would send them once they are opened. However, I was shocked when at the beginning of March she sent me the measures and the pictures of the windows with steel profiles and glass that they had just installed. They did not take into account my plans and they did not consult me on what they were going to do. The result? We could not use those spaces anymore. I tried to find a solution, to remove the glass and replace them with plexiglass panels that we could modify according to the screen and speakers needed, but the documenta production team said it wasn’t possible. They didn’t care if they were messing up the exhibition project and I could not understand why they kept that attitude since the steel profiles that held the glass were screwed. That meeting was the first one we saw documenta production team not helping but the opposite. It was so frustrating because I didn’t ask for anything complicated or expensive, they made a mistake and I just tried to find several solutions during the meetings. I was used to working in Ceuta with building companies that didn’t watch the plans or didn’t understand them, but I was almost everyday on the site checking everything and avoiding misunderstanding, but I could never imagine that situation could happen working in Germany, for an event like documenta, never. After the meeting I thought a lot about what happened and the changes we were forced to introduce in the exhibition, I tried to understand the situation because we were two months ahead of the opening, everybody was quite tired, specially our team that had to deal with custom problems, with the public program, with artists… and at the same time working in other projects. Given the intransigence of the production team, we assumed we had to eliminate some works and introduce at least one of the videos inside. As Nadir Bouhmouch said some weeks later, we should not have accepted some of the changes they imposed on us, especially those derived from their mistakes…
We had so many things to solve that we had no time to spend arguing with them. I had to finish M’barek Bouhchichi’s display, the details of the dry walls, Hadia Gana’s device, and the distribution of Nadir Bouhmouch’s works in the garage. Besides, Francesca asked me to draw some plans for some artists’ installations so we could send them to documenta to be built.
End of March and beginning of April were very stressful weeks, also having to work isolated at home with the Covid, at least I was able to focus exclusively on documenta. I arrived to one conclusion that seemed to me interesting; we were going to have some art installations related to the Jema el-Fnaa square and the medina in the courtyard (Arnakech by Laila Hida and a sound map by Abdellah Hassak), then a stone wall (the facade of the building), an entrance where you had to turn twice before entering into the exhibition. Analysing a circulation sketch I drew, I could say we were repeating the circulation you have to do in Marrakech when you go from the modern city to the medina, through one of the gates. I told myself that was the identity of Marrakech we were going to reproduce, it was no longer necessary to use Moroccan rugs or the ocher color typical of the city or the design of the tiles of LE 18 kitchen in order to show there was a Moroccan exhibition in that space. Thus, the key element to shape that identity was the drywall that was going to separate the entrance from the exhibition, creating the medina gate circulation.
Friday April the 15th, we had another meeting with production, media and artistic teams. There were some problems with the details I had sent. M’barek’s display could not cover the water pipelines, I proposed to add some caster wheels so it could be moved away if someone had to have access to the water shut-off valves. They said they were going to consult the owner of the building but they agreed it could work. That wasn’t the real problem, according to the budget they received it was not possible to build the drywall to separate the entrance from the exhibition area with a smart tablet inside and a small hole to watch the video. It was a part of Hadia’s work. The company that built the partitions asked for a lot of money, it was clear to me they didn’t want to do it and I told them to look for someone else to modify the drywall once installed, but they said there was nobody to do it, everybody was occupied in other venues. At that moment I told myself, you drew a detail to be done in Germany, now you have to change your mind, thinking and drawing a solution as if it was going to be done in the medina of Marrakech, the same way I did for the exhibition À l’épreuve du tamis at LE 18 in February 2020. I quickly made a sketch and I shared it on my screen, but the answer was, “It is not possible”. I couldn’t believe I was having that conversation with a production coordinator of documenta. Lara tried to mediate proposing the use of another device that could be placed on the wall but not inside it, Francesca and Laila tried to explain that the whole idea was to open a “window” on the wall to watch a space of LE 18 in Marrakech, the room where the video had been recorded, from the same perspective of a voyeur. I remained oblivious to the discussion till the moment Laila asked my opinion about some alternatives, I answered, “I’m not a curator, just tell me what kind of device you are going to use and where do you want to place it…” I admit I was not very nice to me but I was so upset that I did not want to argue with documenta production team
Once we finished the meeting I didn’t feel good about the answer I had given to my friends, although I wasn’t addressing them but to the production team, so, I sent them a voice message apologising for the answer and complaining documenta arbitrariness about what we could built or what we could reuse from the warehouses.
Before midnight Francesca wrote a message in our WhatsApp group proposing a trek on Sunday “in the name of radicalism”, after an evening at Le 18 where Laila, Francesca and some friends like M’barek had a conversation about documenta…
Credits texts, photos and drawings: Carlos Pérez Marín