ARCHIVE – Marrakech – part 9 – au revoir Riad Kalila, au revoir Mme Joelle!
Mme Joelle wrote back a dear letter wishing the best and asking what would be the schedule back home.
Mme Joelle is a great strong woman that was a real pleasure to meet, Mme Joelle is the kind of person that still knows what indignation is, what means to distinguish the Good and the Evil, what means to face our world with such a disunited humanity.
Mme Joelle has chosen to move to Marrakech a few years ago and has built her little space of “non hell” that is the Riad Kalila: http://www.riadkalila.com/
Her creation turned out so well that everyone in the Medina calls her Mme Kalila.
The time spent in the riad was filled with attentions and discretion so welcome when you travel.
When asked Mme Joelle might share her experiences, she is a traveler too in a way, she decided to take a longer trip in a country that was not hers and that probably never will, but at least is like listening to Voltaire’s astonishment in front of the diversity, sometimes characterized by the distant Arab mentality.
Merci mille fois Madame Joelle!
P.S.: Mme Joelle speaks a lovely French I wish I could speak it. Mme Joelle is probably what we love about France! Vive la France!
ARCHIVE – Marrakech – part 8 – more Morocco please
No shooting any more, at least not with the same drive, it’s not time, not anymore, these are the last hours in Marrakech and it really feels like it’s time to go, probably to come back and develop what we have just started.
There is not much of a difference between traveling as a tourist and traveling for work, every trip can turn into the same thing, it’s hard to intercept darts of life, the stream of it flows through your hands and it’s hard to grasp it, your expectations might distort your vision and viceversa, I tried to leave it to the camera.
Read reality after, I am looking forward to see the results, to see what will I be able to deduce from the images, those 3 degrees of separation from the world that Ralph Gibson lectures about his photography: scale, two dimensions and color. Three steps away from reality.
I love this alchemy.
ARCHIVE – Marrakech – part 7 – le tanneur
If I want to be impartial, as a witness should be, I should only report what I have seen today, but it would probably be enough, because what I noticed might be intolérable for the majority of us.
I wanted to see the door Bab Debbagh, one of the entrances to the Medina, because I heard it was shaped as a tortuous cross vaulted corridor that connects the inside with the outside. The name literally means “the door of the tanneries”, if you had any experience with the leather tanning process you probably know that the scent is not exactly what you would recommend for a romantic date.
Getting to the tanning quarters was an adventure, people are aggressive in Marrakech, if you stop taking a picture a storm of uneducated children will start chasing you even if you did not take a picture of them but of the soccer field they feel like their own property. If you refuse to give money because you definitely think that it’s not fair to root deeply in their mind that begging is a profession, you end up with a collection of epithets that sound pretty unusual coming from a ten years old inhabitant of Marrakech, especially when the same disrespectful concept is expressed in various different European idioms: “Stronzo, maricon, fuck you!”
The door was interesting, a fracture between the inside, smelling as a sewage and the outside, a real sewage, with people sleeping in their carts and skinny dogs with long leaning ears looking for some shade under an old car or ransacking piles of garbage in search of something to eat. The scenario was framed by a long row of national flags.
The diaphragm itself, the doorway, used to be painted in white, and still is, if you do not count the long series of hand prints dragged on the walls after a happy fellow has dipped his left hand in his own faeces.The smell follow the vision.
The tanneries are an infernal circle, with men soaked in pools filled with rotten leather and pigeon shit, an old men asked me a few dirhams to take his picture while he was removing hairs from a goat skin. As I went back to the major square I had the odour and the corroding substances attached to my trachea, I had to drink several glasses of water, cough and spit, but still the nausea was there.
I still feel the smell after ten hours from the visit.
ARCHIVE – Marrakech – part 6 – le roller!
I do not resist, the most awful meals are there for me to be explored, that’s why now, at 4 in the morning I cannot sleep, my intestines are refusing the mutton head I just drooled over a few hours ago.
I have been roaming quite a bit in the Medina and I spotted almost all the typical products of the place and in one of the little shops I remembered, from a few days ago, I saw some great boots. I love boots, they make me hope that one day, maybe, I’ll be able to ride horses in a decent way, I actually dream, while wearing a pair, that one day, I will. I can imagine the little cracks of the leather of the saddle adjusting under my weight as I hop on the horse, I feel the spurs under my feet, the reins in my hands and I can feel of the undulating movement of the horse, the music of the hoofs on the ground, the gallop.
So again I wake up that I am already trying these cool boots in a shop and the guy knows that I’ll buy them, he damn knows, the deal is going to be hard, but in the end I’ll use all my Middle Eastern skills to get them.
In the middle of my browsing the Muezin calls for one of the five prayers, so the shopkeeper apologizes, wears a white pin striped caftan, adjusts his long, thick beard, takes off his glasses and invites me to wait in the shop while he reaches the mosque.
I feel a bit more comfortable on the street so there I go, camera in my hand snapping at the crowd moving around, people look at you when you take pictures, they do not like it lot, but they got used to it, and they got used to me too, the Medina people recognize you after a while and tolerate your presence.
In this framing and snapping process a lad comes straight to me, and I start thinking that I pissed him so much he in going to tell me something awful, ask for the film or complain about why am I taking that picture.
The guy is young, in his late teenage years and his French is definitely more fluent than mine, or is that just Arabic spoken with a French accent? Must be, because a homeless guy that passes by feels entitled to be the interpreter and comes closer pretending to explain to me what the guy wants (the idiom unknown), in the meantime the shopkeeper comes back and argues with the two men, he does not want to loose his client. I turn to Mirta that everyone here consider my wife, automatically, no possibility for a man and a women that walk around together not to be married, and she tries to pick up the few words of french coming out of the waving hands, faces turning, eyes twisting charade.
“Le roller! le roller!” the young boy keeps on repeating
“He says he wants to ski” the homeless guy in a broken English
“Iallah iallah!” the shopkeeper insistently repeats
I turn again to Mirta with a question mark on my face: “che dice? che vuole? che ho fatto?”
The trader turns away the toothless tramp, gets in the shop trying to pull me in, the lad grabs me and talks to Mirta repeating: “Ghelize, Ghelize, Ghelize, le roller, le roller”
Marrakech as we have already figured it out, is a small town and the young guy was looking for the photographer that took pictures of his performance on the rollerblades in Ghelize a few days before.
I handed him my business card and explained how to get them, he let the hold and I bought boots, at half the price the merchant asked for, I still feel I paid them more than I ought to.
P.S.: it’s 4 in the morning and the rooster is singing … damn it!!!
ARCHIVE – Marrakech – part 5 – rain in the Medina
Rain and Marrakech are two separate worlds, not much rain in this part of the world, the water that made the birth of this city possible was coming from the Atlas mountains through a system of tunnels called “Khettarha”, we had the pleasure to explore along with the geology faculty staff of the University of Marrakech (FAC for those familiar with the place).
The Sultan that founded the city tried to avoid a inevitable clash over the water resources of the Atlas mountains that belonged to the Berber population, so hired a group of Jews that had experience in the water supplying systems in desert areas, and so it was that this part of the world could have a sustainable agricultural micro climate.
Now the khettaras are dry empty tunnels, a danger for the kids that might fall in the digging/maintenance wells some deep up to 50 meters and also a problem for the new buildings rising all around Marrakech, that might need some special foundations to prevent from collapsing in the ground.
The khettaras are the reason why Marrakech was an endless garden, with palm trees that now are disappearing, dieing of a non curable disease. The population has lost memory of the scenario when everything was irrigated by the underground tunnels, there were fishes in the khettaras, there was life in and around the catch basins, there was life and now there is a desert and a forest, but the latter is made of pillars, with branches for the air cooling systems to grow and a storm of satellite dishes on the roofs.
This is the counter offer of the government to a lifestyle, the one you can still witness in the Medina and that of the rural settlements once outside the city walls. It’s all politics, it works, as the Romans used to do: “Divide et impera”.
Create monads with no doors or windows, so that envy can grow and ignorance can flourish.
Rain in the Medina is just a drop in this ocean, a cleaning hand that will wipe off the superficial dust, people are still digging in the dirt.
ARCHIVE – Marrakech – part 3 – the rollerblade night
Little by little we learn that what the Lonely Planet guide say is all crap.
Mark, an English nurse residing in the same riad, met one of the writers from LP in Cambodia and the selection of reastaurants was made on a few opinions collected while sipping a coffee in a one day stop in the capital. Apparently some streets have changed all the shop signs of the premises according to the name suggested by the guide.
In Marrakech the restaurants suggested by the guide are filthy and dark, while, just a bit off the main track you can find a paradise, called “Eveil des Sense” in Ghelize. A dinner for two at only 27 euros, with the best pastilla ever and a tajine with lamb and plums that will leave you speechless. The service is also great, with a waiter extremely attentive but not intrusive. Thank you!
What about the the rollerblade night?
Well … this is where we actually met the real people a group of rollerblade enthisiasts that started practicing on their own, under the guide of a more experienced skater that act like a sort of leader.
As I started taking pictures they all got extremely excited and wanted to show me all they were capable of and the ramp was changed from a basic one to a longer and steeper one. Kids of any age jumping one over the other, one after the other, not always succcesfully, but always collecting the applause of the crowd.
Some told me about their daily life as shoemakers in the Medina, some have noticed me before in the Suq, Marrakech is a city of a thousand eyes, everybody knows everybody sees.
©KEVO.biz
I found myself taking picture with my extremely basic Bessa-L equipped with a Russian 35mm and an old but reliable Sunpak flash.
ARCHIVE – Marrakech – part 3 – taking pictures
In Marrakech I am also taking pictures, but you won’t see them till I go back home, I am shooting film again, black and white.
I am shooting without framing, I am again looking forward for a sort of sensibility to the subject and a subtle lower point of view that might give me an unusual perspective.
I am photographing basically because “I like to see what reality looks like once photographed” (Gary Winogrand), to quote someone I really like, although he might have said it in a different way.
I am happy I am travelling with only two extremely light rangefinder cameras and three lenses, a 35mm a 50mm and an 85mm of which I am using only two, the first and the latter.
Photographing this way is quite discrete, although people now notice the noise of the winding cranck, that is totally lost in the digital era.
I do not know what I am looking for here, I am actually hoping to capture the “Genius Loci”, who would not like to, you may notice, but in this case I am feeling quite close. Everytime I hold my camera and start taking pictures I realise that my personality is in the backstage and the eye is silencing all the other voices.
I am thinking of putting a book together.