Premise

Chahine and Kaïs’s artistic practice involves collecting, recording and transforming found materials into multimedia archives and artefacts. In the face of disappearance and environmental destruction, they ask themselves: how can alternative forms of archiving reclaim a space for those whose histories are systematically erased? In this regard, picking up what is left behind, attending to the junk, to the discarded and the forgotten becomes a way to tell the stories of people and beings whose voices tend to disappear.

Recently, the artist duo’s research has centred around the notion of landscape as a living archive, investigating how overlapping histories of neoliberalism and colonialism manifest in built environments and urban ecosystems. Exploring the periurban region of their hometown, Casablanca, they have developed, over the past couple of years, several projects documenting the invisible margins of the city and the transformations which affect its local landscape.
For the project they aimed to develop during the Homebound residency, Chahine and Kaïs’s focus shifted to the politics of urban planning, reflecting on the impacts of real estate speculation and the accumulation of unfinished buildings in the city. In the past couple of decades, Casablanca has been facing a steady increase in housing demand which was in turn answered by unregulated and uncontrolled real estate speculation. As more and more lands in the city and on its periphery are being invested in by private companies to develop housing projects, a fair number of them never get beyond the stage of being a construction site. Inhabitants of those lands and their surroundings are now neighbours to unfinished buildings and abandoned construction sites which, with time, start to resemble the likes of modern ruins.

Suspended in an ambiguous state between the promise of a future home and an aborted housing project, these sites prompted the artists to ask the questions which directed their initial proposal for the residency: what are we building for our communities and when does a building become a house? Moreover, when a housing project becomes an abandoned construction site, what new relationships can these abandoned structures weave with their urban environment? How can communities reclaim these residual spaces for themselves and for their neighbourhoods?

 

 

 

Process

Field Research / Documentation:

The initial phase of Chahine and Kaïs’s project involved extensive field research, mapping, documenting and photographing various sites around the city, as well as meeting with local political and community actors to understand the implications of urban planning policy from different perspectives more deeply.
During their site visits, they also collected found objects and construction materials. As part of their process, they spent time exploring the sculptural qualities of these materials, which later became the foundation of a miniature city installation.

 

Participatory Action:

The subsequent phase involved community outreach; meeting with various local community organisations to form a group which would take part in a program of workshops, inviting participants to collectively generate proposals for the future of our city. The artists then partnered up with Chabab Al Borj, a grassroots organisation dedicated to social and environmental action, with whom they decided to collaborate with on this program. Working with a group of 12 young people, they together re-claimed tools inspired by architectural practice, such as photomontage rendering and model-making, and imagined creative reappropriations of abandoned construction sites for the benefit of the community.

This program sparked many conversations and debates about our relationship to the built environment and what the future of our city would look like. Using speculation as a tool to construct alternative visions of the future, the participants generated a series of proposals that reimagine ways of inhabiting disused spaces and abandoned construction sites. These proposals, open-ended and interpretative, do not seek to provide a definitive answer as per how to finalise these incomplete structures, but instead aim to delve into the possibilities they hold. The representations stemming from these proposals are imbued with a sense of potential futures, a radical temporality that points us to worlds not-yet-to-come.

 

 

 

 

 

Outcomes

From conversations and works generated in the process of carrying out field visits, gathering materials on site and through the participatory program, a multimedia body of work emerged, which extends an invitation to engage with alternative narratives for the present and the future of our built environment.
Central questions permeate this body of work: How do we inhabit the uninhabitable? How can we reclaim a future in common for our cities?

This body of work includes:

- Cranes of Casablanca (Super 8, sound, colour, 24 fps, 1 min. 50 s.) A video piece documenting an abandoned construction site located on the coastline of Casablanca, home to a community of cranes and seasonally inhabited by migratory birds.
- Stray Dogs (35mm film photograph printed on fine art paper 300 gsm). A photograph taken in one of the many Casablanca’s outskirt real-estate coastline projects. Two dogs are seen resting on a pile of gravel, a villa in construction in the background.
- A Modern City (bricks, tiles, plastic toy, HD video projection from digitised 35mm slide film and Super 8 film). An installation made of repurposed construction bricks rearranged as a miniature city, with projections of the Casablanca skyline and footage from Cranes of Casablanca.. This installation was inspired from a workshop led with the children of the community organisation Chabab Al Borj.
- Concrete Utopias (series of screen print collages on 3D architectural rendering). A series of collages presenting speculative reappropriations of unfinished construction sites. This series resulted from a workshop with the children of the community organisation Chabab Al Borj.
- Show-flat (book, 36 pages, 15 x 20 cm). A book exploring the language of real-estate marketing imagery through a series of 35mm film photographs of construction site fences layed-out in conversation with a text written by Yassine Rachidi, an artist and writer specialising in critical urbanism.