CASABLANCA, Morocco — On a recent evening, at sunset, in a suburb of Casablanca, seagulls circled above a vast, dilapidated construction. At first glance, Casablanca’s old slaughterhouse — a surprisingly attractive and grand complex of 1920s neo-Mauresque buildings — appears abandoned. It’s not.
Inside, a scroll of eye-popping graffiti and murals wraps around the walls. In one building, a small crowd is watching a lyrical documentary film about three old Moroccan men who continue, despite their age, to work the jobs they started as children. In a courtyard, kids play on stylish jungle gyms built by visiting Dutch design students in collaboration with local craftsmen.
Last time I visited Morocco, three years ago, I discovered La Fabrique Culturelle, (The Culture Factory) a groundbreaking initiative set up by a collective of Moroccan artists. Five years ago, they began with a vision to turn the vast, crumbling space into a cultural center in the midst of the working-class neighborhood of Hay Mohammadi and create a place where young Moroccans could both produce and consume art of their own making.
The cultural associations that administer the space want it to be free, accessible and open to all forms of contemporary art. They have made sure the factory hosts a regular stream of events — everything from concerts featuring Casablanca’s many talented young bands to fashion shows to breakdance competitions and film screenings. Anyone can sign up to hold an event; space is available for workshops and rehearsals. “We think the new theater, music, dance scene is very dynamic,” says the project’s coordinator, Dounia Benslimane. “But it was missing a space.”
Yet all of this promising activity is precarious, powered only by optimism and determination. The city authorities, which own the slaughterhouse and originally encouraged its conversion for cultural use, have dragged their feet when asked to formalize the arrangement. Without an official agreement with the city, artists can’t renovate or raise funds.
“We’ve knocked on all the doors,” says Benslimane. “But no one answers.”
Perhaps that’s because what’s taking place at the slaughterhouse doesn’t fit the government’s narrow vision of culture. The music festivals that are common across the land tend to feature polished traditional Moroccan groups or big-name Western acts, to attract tourism and burnish the country’s image. Whereas one of the country’s most popular forms of youth culture — rap — is seen as disreputable and dangerous. A famous young rapper, El-Haqed (The Enraged) was sentenced to one year in prison in 2012 for a song insulting the police.
This year, one of the associations running the Culture Factory invited representatives of Morocco’s different political parties to discusstheir views about culture in a series of talks. They asked participants three questions: What spaces would you designate for cultural activities? How would you fund them? And how would you reach different audiences?
Unfortunately, says Kenza Sefrioui, a journalist and one of the talks’ organizers, the participants’ answers were short on specifics and long on platitudes. And the Islamist Justice and Development party, which heads the government, didn’t send a representative.
Sefrioui thinks the ethos of the Culture Factory — independent, participatory and for “citizen democracy” — rubs the authorities the wrong way. She says they have decided that “we only have the right to exist in an informal way.”
Across the Arab world, artists are caught between bureaucrats with a top-down vision of culture — as an activity the state sponsors and controls — and Islamists who often want the arts to be policed for disrespect or lewdness. In the region’s crowded cities, finding open, affordable spaces is a challenge.
Yet young Arabs are less and less likely to accept that their voices and views shouldn’t be heard.
In Cairo, where I live most of the year, and where the Arab Spring has brought both freedom and chaos, artists have taken to the streets, painting amazing murals and staging performances in the streets or unconventional spaces like shop windows. Some have been holding a combination of performances and protests at the Ministry of Culture since June 5, in opposition to a new minister affiliated with the ruling Muslim Brotherhood.
The formal rehabilitation of Casablanca’s slaughterhouse into a creative space would be a landmark venture, in Morocco and regionally. The authorities are wrong not to support it more fully: They shouldn’t be threatened by the idea of young people congregating and expressing themselves freely; what’s dangerous is not giving them anywhere to do it.
