Every Sunday, Botanical Colors sits down for an interview with a luminary in the natural dye and textile world. Today we get to meet Yto Barrada, a Moroccan-French artist recognized for her multidisciplinary investigations of cultural phenomena and historical narratives.
In 2006, Yto founded the artist-run Cinémathèque de Tanger, North Africa’s first cinema cultural center, now an internationally appreciated institution. She also founded The Mothership in Tangier, a radical eco-campus for artists, makers, and researchers growing, making, and learning natural dyes and indigenous traditions, and a place for experimental collective artistic practice through art residencies and workshops.
Her work has been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, Mass MoCA, Tate Modern, the Barbican, The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art to name a few.
We’re offering a trip to The Mothership in Tangier in August and we are so excited for it. Consider it a 10 day residency with like-minded makers, dyers and thinkers perched on a cliff, overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar and Spain. So exciting.
For now, we’ll take a Sunday Visit with Yto to dream of a place we most certainly can put on our bucket lists.
You grew up in a farmhouse in Tangier, what are your earliest memories of nature there?
The property where I grew up used to belong to the Scottish painter James McBey and his wife Marguerite. There are two structures, the family house and the gardener’s house, a huge garden-forest, and just below what is now our property line, their ocean bathing house which was visited in the 40’s by illustrious guests like Jane and Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. While the land was not a farm in any official sense, we always had animals – dogs, horses that came to retire, and later donkeys as well.
The garden marks the rhythm of time and seasons with different bloom. In the fall amaryllis, in the winter irises, in the spring agapanthus and calla lily, ginger and mimosa, and in the summer: poppies, zinnias, nasturtium, morning glory, night blooming jasmine and giant hollyhocks, which are my favorites. We also grow veggies, medicinal herbs and fruits, strawberries, quince, prunes and pomegranate. Today when I call home, flowers, rain and wind are the first things I discuss with my family.
Can you talk about your desire to cultivate indigenous and historical natural dye plants at The Mothership?
My botanical education started with what was under my nose. Because of its location, the zone of Tangier was once one of the most biodiverse areas in the world. Our garden is situated on the tip of Africa on the Strait of Gibraltar, and from this vantage point I was able to glean an understanding of the circulation of plants, their migration and their colonial histories. Our wisteria, for example, can be identified as Chinese or Japanese by the direction that the vines twist. Australian Eucalyptus, which we have different specimens of, were imported by the French and the Spanish to dry the swamps and to fight malaria (planted for the same reasons in California in 1850s), grows abundantly in Morocco. It produces a beautiful yellow color, but it’s invasive and unfortunately they did not bring any koalas to mitigate the spread of the eucalyptus population. Some plants are local African or Mediterranean, some have been naturalized, imported and adapted to the soil and climate over centuries, and many have disappeared with climate change.
As a dyer, I was interested in the history of the plants I was using, and wanted to know what had disappeared from the land, what was imported and what persisted. I remember handing my dye book to a botanist and asking what I should plant, and he marked all the pages. We had almost all of it, and I could forage in my own forest.
The practice of natural dyes has mainly disappeared from Moroccan crafts; it only survives in isolated communities in the Atlas Mountains that have no access to chemical dyes.
I started growing natural dyes as a micro-production and as a resource for teaching. Over the last years, The Mothership has built dyeing facilities and systems for drying and archiving the dyeing plants. We are just finalizing the construction of a brand new dyeing studio, financed by a grant from ArtAngel.
In the dye garden, We have reintroduced local plants like different madder (rubia peregrina and tinctoria) but also plants from the Americas and Asia. For example, we grow cosmos from Korea and Nicaragua and indigo from Japan and France (persicaria tinctoria and isatis tinctoria).
I discovered natural dyes when I was an artist in residence at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn 9 years ago with artist Natalie Stopka. And naturally, that Brooklyn community has continued to inspire me. Over the years, many have supported us and visited for short visits or taught workshops: Hannah Schultz and Kelly Valetta, Cara Marie Piazza and of course the one and only Isa Rodrigues – who among other talents, she has designed our educational program and tools and who continues to be a essential member of our community.
We organized a Botanical Symposium centered on Natural Dyes in Marrakech in 2018 with the Berber Museum (part of the Yves Saint Laurent museum) and the growing interest of the scientific and artistic community there was fantastic. Michel Garcia, the Casablanca-born master dyer and Cecilia Aguirre, a textile conservator who works in Colore ton Monde, near Paris and created the first CSA specialised in dye plants Tinctilis also visited and advised us.
I was reading an article on the Stedelijk Museum’s blog about a series of your works over the years around themes such as “the acceleration and deceleration of time, motherhood, the history of education and play, the artisanry of natural dyes and color as material, traditions of modernism, and our futile attempts to control nature.” What is a theme you are most drawn to right now? Why?
I learned from Cecile Aguirre to test lightfastness of dyes, where fabric samples are sent to a lab for xeno-tests, where their aging is accelerated. I discovered then, that weathering machines existed.
This discovery inspired me to direct two films in weathering stations, The Power of Two or Three Suns, and A Day Is Not A Day for the 2021 Whitney Biennial.
My approach in the works that I do in textiles is deeply rooted in the measure of time and in all the reasons that made the (natural) dyes stop being used: time-consuming, difficult to predict and reproduce results… These challenges are what I value. Through the work of making colors with nature, I’m reevaluating and unlearning the value of time.
How important is it to you to have a space where people can come and move slowly through their own research? What do you hope comes from this slow-learning model?
At The Mothership, we wanted to offer space and time for exploration and research, away from the ordinary deadlines and pressure to be productive and deliver. We want to create a botanical and textile archive and become an artist colony and residency. I hope it becomes a place to share and exchange knowledge and culture, and a place where Moroccan and international artists and makers can be in dialogue and collaborate.
Exploring the garden and being in Tangier, will also provide context for research on other eco-feminist concerns that are urgent, like water preservation, soil quality, food insecurity, trading relationships with Europe and African countries.
I started another project in Tangier, 17 years ago as a non-profit in the city center, the Cinematheque de Tanger, an arthouse cinema and archive. It has become a cultural hub and important community gathering place. I see The Mothership as an expansion of this project.
What’s a color you’re drawn to right now and why?
Browns and Black. This summer I will start on the different roads to black. The history of making the color black with all the different recipes is fascinating and it touches on black magic too: oak gall ink is still used in the making of talismans.
Experience The Colors of Tangier at The Mothership With Yto Barrada and Cara Marie Piazza here!