Yto Barrada
Wallpaper – Tangier, 2001
C-type print
60 x 60 cm
At first glance this looks like an image of an idyllic Alpine landscape in the sun, still some snowy caps on the mountaintops and a cluster of pine trees surrounding a glistening and inviting lake. Looking closer the seam down the middle and peeling paper reveals this is in fact a photograph of a photo-wallpaper mural depicting this scene in a two-dimensional print. Barrada took this image of the interior of a café in Tangier, hence the title of the work. There are multiple levels of displacement here: the mountains are moved to the urban streets of Morocco and Barrada further displaces this scene into an at context.
Wallpaper — Tangier is part of a larger project by Yto Barrada into the identity of post-colonial Morocco and the importance of the Strait of Gibraltar in particular, mainly looking at tourist posters, interiors and advertising imagery. This bit of water has long been a gateway between Europe and Africa and a site of fraught colonial, economic and geopolitical negotiations.
About this Barrada writes: 'Before 1991 any Moroccan with a passport could travel freely to Europe. But since the European Union’s (EU) Schengen Agreement, visiting rights have become unilateral across what is now legally a one-way strait. A generation of Moroccans has grown up facing this troubled space that manages to be at once physical, symbolic, historical and intimately personal'1 She has long been fascinated with these border politics, being born in Paris but growing up in Tangier and being surrounded by images like this wallpaper that idealised the West and sold a dream of mobility that was no longer available to most.
1 (A Life Full of Holes — The Strait Project, 2005, p. 57, quoted from Collection Study: Yto Barrada, Wallpaper — Tangier).