Exkursion: School of Casablanca

The ten day excursion to Morocco was part of the seminar „School of Casablanca“ led by Prof. Céline Condorelli and Freia Achenbach. The aim of the seminar and the excursion was both research on and development of methods and projects borrowing questions of the relationship between arts and crafts, methods of abstraction and aspects of textile mediums.

The School of Casablanca, founded in the 1920s by the colonial authorities went through different phases and it is especially the phase after the independence in the 1960s which thereby stand as a model both for the exhibition and the seminar. To this time interdisciplinary artists and researchers renewed the concept and pedagogy of the school whereby artists should be educated not as passive witnesses but agent with the potential to provoke cultural visions for a more self conscious generation. Therefore the Bauhaus curriculum was renegotiated and turned towards studies of local crafts. Relationships and influences between western modernism and the Maghreb region can be traced down already earlier, whether it is Paul Klee’s „Carpet“ sketch from 1927 which recalls oriental carpets stacked on each other like in a bazaar or the exhibition „Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art“ held at Theresienhöhe in Munich, 1910 with more than 3600 Artworks.

The excursion took place from November 10th to 20th with 15 students from different departments of HfG Karlsruhe. We participated in the program of the School of Casablanca Exhibition and visited different locations and workshops connected to the local textile manufactories. The final projects were presented in the beginning of 2024.

https://schoolofcasablanca.com

Many thanks to Rabii Alouai who offered us special insights into his world of carpets.