A DÉRIVE THROUGH CASABLANCA, HISTORY AND MINDS, Part 2, November 2022

School of Casablanca, SCHOOL OF CASABLANCA PUBLIC SERIES
OCTOBER – DECEMBER 2022, which contours are taking the shape of a School of Walking, slowly moving through urban layouts, historic texts and textures of minds.
Walks initiated by Bik Van der Pol, with Fatima Mazmouz, Hassan Darsi, Maria Daïf, Manal Aziz & Hamza Boussedra and Mohamed Fariji.

For this part of their public programme, Bik Van der Pol propose the activity of walking and thinking collectively with the goal of eventually producing a filmed visual essay. Bik Van der Pol think of walking as an act of resistance, while simultaneously asking how, and where one goes to.
The points of departure are the connections between today, the Casablanca Art School and Souffles magazine (banned in 1972), both associated with a revolutionary student movement at a time of sit-ins, strikes, and labour unrest. What is the effect of revolutionary movements on education in light of amnesia, the larger capitalist, extractivist drive and the urban modernization processes that produce ruins, ruptures and gaps while moving on to the next swath of land to develop? How to encompass simultaneous realities while moving, if we experience the city as an environment, an ecological entity where citizens appropriate this ‘live tissue’ on a daily basis?
The process of walking has the potential to weave relationships between urban texture and text in context of larger discussions of decolonization and modernization. Drawing lines between different markers, or ‘actors’, and understanding these as archives and the materialization of concepts, the political moment as explored in the L’ École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca at the time may open perspectives on how ideas can be recycled and approached today.
The walks will be developed in collaboration with different actors, marking moments in space and time, including the participation of students of L’ École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca and other contexts, architects, artists and local experts.