BARCELONA, SPAIN.- The Contemporary Culture Center in Barcelona (CCCB) presents "Fez, Interior City," on view through May 30,2002. Fez, Interior City is an exhibition curated by architect and historian Albert Garcia Espuche and video-artist Toni Serra. It proposes a journey inside the city of Fez, specifically Fs el Bali, the old town, in the form of eleven projections which bring together the different video and audio recordings which Serra made in the course of a progressive immersion into the Moroccan city in 2000 and 2001.
The exhibition illustrates the reality of a Fez which is complex, mixed and full of conflicts, quite different to the clichs of the tourist business, in the form of a journey which leads visitors from the public to the private space, allowing them glimpses of the rich, complex relations in ways of understanding space and time both inside the Medina and beyond.
Broadly speaking, the layout of eleven projections follows the itinerary explained above, leading from public to private space. In this way, it begins with a projection set in the framework of the city gates leading into the Medina, moves on to another projection which centres on the outlying streets and markets, to discover on the third screen the craftsmen of Fez. This is followed by a recording which shows the world's most important tannery. This film is a transition phase, since up until this point we have been "visiting" the places in Fez which are accessible to tourists. From here on, we enter an increasingly interiorised Fez, concealed from the Western eye.
The fifth projection goes into the restaurants, cafes, funduks (guest houses) and the ovens which provide the hammams with heat. The next video goes into the madrassas (Koran schools) and, further in, the half public, half private alleyway known as the derb, a place with an established urban and social structure but which is very vulnerable to the devastating effects of globalisation. Then we enter the house, the most intimate of all spaces, and, in the course of the four final projections, become privileged spectators at celebrations that form part of the spiritual and private life of the inhabitants of Fez: the lamb festival, the Lila Gnawa (religious trance ritual with curing powers), the Karawin mosque (Fez's main centre of worship, where only Muslims may enter; it houses the most important library in the Arab world and is the headquarters of the university) and the dikr Allah (memory of Allah, a religious trance ritual).
Fez, Interior City, an initiatory journey
The title Fez, Interior City illustrates the interior nature of the old town and its urban and architectural structure, and of the city's cultural and religious peculiarity. It is also a reflection of the purpose of the project and the expository approach of this installation. It is an initiatory journey to the interior of a city and of a culture.
The series of projections which comprise this exhibition aims to create a journey to the interior of the city of Fez, in the complex sense of the word, using audiovisual segments which illustrate different aspects of the city's anthropological, sociological, planning and religious fabric. A journey, though, which calls for a degree of both objectivity (in the working method) and subjectivity (in the experience of a journey and a close look at another culture).
The structure and the itinerary of the projections seek to highlight the initiatory nature of any itinerary which involves a real inward journey. Initiatory in the sense of gradually revealing contents which are concealed or unknown at the beginning, in which each level represents a change of viewpoint on what we have seen before and a doorway leading to the next level.
However, the projections do not obey the filmic criterion of a beginning and an end; instead, they create a landscape whose length and fragments the viewers select, allowing more in-depth consultation of specific fragments (artisans, rituals, interviews, etc.). As a result, each average-length visit to the exhibition will produce a different and unique combination of fragments, given that the total length of projections is approximately four hours.
If we wish to examine the various degrees of complexity of Fez society, it is vital to capture two realities at the same time: firstly, the physical reality of the landscape of the Medina and, secondly, the infinite faces of the society which inhabits it: its complexity and diversity, its stance on life and sense of humour, its skills and resources, its aspirations and frustrations... The aim is, then, to capture not just a physical space, but an inhabited physical space, where the conditions of the container are absolutely inseparable from the qualities of the contents.
A basic understanding of the physical and social structure of the city of Fez calls for in-depth observation, because it is a city, and a society, made up of various layers, each more difficult than the last to penetrate, which has to be approached as a whole if we hope to grasp the complex reality which shapes the totality.
