A woman in Tangiers: against erasure

Five people are passing through a gate leading to the souk of the Tangier kasbah on a winter’s day in 1935.

To the viewer’s far left, a boy walks barefoot. In the middle, two Berber women draped in layers of cloth are wearing large straw hats. One carries a hefty clay vessel on her back; the other, closer to the photographer, shouldering a basket, gazes casually at the camera. Towards the center, a man in a cloak and turban carries an empty basket. These four people seem to be returning from the market. To the right, a woman in European clothes is the only figure who is walking in the opposite direction, with her back to us.

The characters appear unrelated, each is in his or her own world.

Their layered clothes suggest it’s winter. The short shadows tell us the time is around midday. In the gate’s vaults, straw bags are displayed for sale. Through the gate, one can see market stalls; in one of them, I detect the head of a mannequin. Then the grains get too coarse.

In my practice, which I call Documentary Architecture, I examine archival images for material clues and digital traces, searching for a geography that cuts across history and scale, from the graininess of photographic paper, or the granularity of aggregate in concrete, to the geopolitical carving of entire regions. This Tangier street scene is one of the treasures I keep revisiting: it complicates the colonialist narrative by showing how modernism interacts with earlier traditions, capturing something of that moment when, as Walter Benjamin writes « the past flashes up at a moment of danger. » At this gateway between Europe and Africa, this « moment » is part of the emergent language of early twentieth-century modernism, sometimes local and sometimes colonial, that appeared along the Mediterranean basin from Tangier, Oran, Tunis, Benghazi, Tripoli and Cairo via Jaffa and Haifa to Damascus and Beirut. This street scene predates the shifting borders of the war zones of North Africa and the Middle East during the Second World War, but also the brutal reality of national and settler-colonial borders that make it impossible to view this coastline today as one continuum.