Tangier’s old mountain road is a place lost in time. It snakes up through the hill, shaded by the trees that seem to rustle with promise, growing as they do above the tall walls hiding sequestered properties. It follows the sea and occasionally captures views of Spain beyond. Mohammed VI has his palace hidden away here. The king has a healthy appetite for change in the city, a change that is now relentless. At its heart, the corniche has been tidied up, spruced and transformed with great constructions built into the water: a permanent home to restaurants and nightclubs. Further along the seafront, past the floodlit old medina, turning a curve or two of well-maintained grass, a road slips off to the right and busy city life is left far behind. Almost as far as one can go along it, behind one of those endless walls, is the multidisciplinary artist Yto Barrada’s lair.
Originally built as the gardener’s house for the early 20th-century artist James McBey (whose own enchanting home is still intact, a stone’s throw away), it is now her family’s summerhouse; she calls it the Mothership. Next to the house Yto, who has made natural colours a part of her art, has now created a dye house for the transformation of cottons, wools, linen, silks and silk velvets. These threads and fabric are shaded with pigments largely drawn from the plants that she grows in a tamed area of the garden. (For her recent, third exhibition at Pace gallery in London, Bite the Hand, she used her colour-coded fabrics in patchworks to echo Frank Stella’s stripe pieces, which he did following a 1960 trip to Morocco. He gave those pieces local names.)
Yto worked originally ‘in a tiny shed that I shared with the gardener and the animals. When you are printing and silk-screening – you can imagine how expensive and precious silk velvet is. To have it next to someone’s boots and tools!’ Michel Garcia, a master dyer, was horrified. ‘You need a dye house,’ he advised her firmly at the time. ‘I got studio envy from [the visual artist] Aboubakar Fofana,’ adds Yto, ‘who in Mali has these incredible pots from Japan that he dyes in.’ Yto realised that she needed a proper studio to be able to create her art, which is seasonal: dyeing in the spring and summer, and then the rest of the year constructing collages. ‘It goes with the harvest season,’ she says.
Along with interior architect Marion Mailaender, Yto created the dye house, with a small library above to accommodate her textile collection. She collects Salé embroidery –‘lost treasure’, as she describes it. ‘I had a passion for textile because it’s at the crossroads of the history of labour, the history of architecture.’ Yto’s cousin Thalia Bajon-Bouzid is a conservator/restorer who worked on the extraordinary Lady and the Unicorn tapestries at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. ‘That’s how I was initiated into all this,’ declares Yto, who first started working with natural dyes ten years ago, when she moved to New York (now her primary residence). She signed up for a year of classes at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. ‘Most people who go there are fantastically talented. They’re textile conservators. They went to Scad [Savannah School of Art and Design]. But I had this project that I did in Tangier about a smuggler wearing all the clothes on their body, and passing the border with the fabrics, for contraband. I had this lady that would put around her body all the textiles that were in demand in Tangier’s market, and she would walk like a Sesame Street character in the street! Then the smugglers would remove all the clothes and sell them in the market. I’m interested in forms of resistance and border constraints. Human genius!’
During the classes, which included embroidery and machine-knitting, artist Natalie Stopka spoke on natural dyes. ‘It was like a slap in the face, a moment of complete revelation, the mix between the history, the art and science. Something that was indigenous to so many populations, something that had disappeared because of Perkin in 1856 [the discovery of chemical dyes and of mauveine] and the invention of the mole’ – which helped to standardise experimental chemistry.
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Because of the McBey legacy, the property has a history that’s linked to the UK. ‘I’m embracing this lineage and trying to remap the garden,’ Yto explains. ‘I’m going to Aberdeen to see his archives, to see what he planted and what is left. He had diaries of his gardens.’ She has taken an area of this wild land, with its ancient trees, to grow plants for dyeing. ‘When I was at the Gwangju Biennale, they sent me to buy a sandwich, and I found a field of cosmos.’ She recalls returning with her pockets heaving. ‘I’m like a big seed thief!’ The landscape around the planting seems to melt into the seascape far below. ‘When you start planting there’s something very spiritual about having something you harvested. When your pot is exhausted, you can still use it to make pigments and colours and lacs for paint.’
In 2018, she organised a talk about natural dyes at the Faculty of Sciences Semlalia in Marrakesh. Professor Ahmed Ouhammou spoke about what was left in Morocco, explaining that there are a few isolated communities in the Atlas that don’t have access to big pharma products with which to dye things, so the poor still use pomegranate skins, for instance.
Trucks full of the fruit would empty them in the middle of the Jemaa el-Fnaa, the vast square in Marrakesh’s medina, because they wanted people to eat the flesh, leaving them the skins. ‘That’s one of the fantastic dyes that you use to make yellows, greens, almost-blacks,’ Yto explains. ‘In Morocco these natural colours are still used in cosmetics. They’re available at the market. They’re also used as medicine – the healing garden and the dye garden were always companions. The dye house is a place of community.’
The building acts as a creative hub. George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic fame, a musical innovator (Mothership Connection is the name of his 1975 album), was one artist who visited last summer. At 82, he came to work, joining others. ‘It was fantastic to have such different ages,’ says Yto. ‘Inter-generational work! The house is full of people who come in and out, come with their kids,’ she explains. ‘We cook together, we work together. It is a restorative place. Tangier is slow-paced: it’s a great place for retreat, for thinking.’
For more about Yto Barrada, visit ytobarrada.com
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