Anagramme Agadir (Agadir Anagram), 2018

Video collage

16mm transferido a digital

11 min.

From May 1st to June 06, 2021

The Moroccan coastal city of Agadir was destroyed by an earthquake in 1960; in this film, part of Yto Barrada’s 2018 commission for The Curve at the Barbican Center (London), Barrada collages black and white newsreel footage following the devastating event. Returning to themes of construction, reconstruction and collage in an architectural context, Barrada’s film depicts buildings all over the city rearranged, in disarray. On many occasions the interviewees featured on the news cannot speak – instead, they make a wordless sound, a “rrrrrr” or a “brrrrmm,” calling to mind the Lettrist poet Isidore Isou who wrote poems with only vowels or consonants.

The Moroccan radical and writer Mohammed Khair-Eddine wrote his book Agadir in 1967 after surveying the devastation left by the earthquake. Khair-Eddine sought to represent the ruins of the city, remaking language into surreal imagery that mirrored the fragmentary voices and experiences of post-disaster life.

Yto Barrada (b. 1971, Paris) is a Franco-Moroccan artist renowned for her multidisciplinary investigations of cultural phenomena and historical narratives. Engaging with the performativity of archival practices and public interventions, Barrada’s installations reinterpret social relations, uncover subaltern histories, and reveal the prevalence of fiction in institutionalized narratives.

In 2006, Barrada founded the Cinémathèque de Tanger, the first art-house theater dedicated to celebrating local and international cinema in Tangier.

Her work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, the Barbican, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Renaissance Society, Witte de With, the Walker Art Center, Whitechapel Gallery, and in the 2007 and 2011 editions of the Venice Biennale.

Barrada has received multiple awards, including the Roy R. Neuberger Prize (2019); the Tiger Award for Best Short Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2016); the Abraaj Group Art Prize, UAE (2015); the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography (2013); and Deutsche Guggenheim Artist of the Year (2011).