From Rome to Rabat: Carla Accardi’s Encounters with Moroccan Modernism

Abstract

Abstract In December 1972, the Sicilian, Rome-based artist Carla Accardi landed in Rabat for an exhibition at the Galerie de l’Atelier. The exhibition included her Tent (1965–1966), a nomadic dwelling built with see-through plastic sheets and adorned with arabesque signs and luminous waves, as well as a series of paintings on canvas made of similar colourful signs. This essay contextualises Accardi’s journey from Rome to Rabat, the first of her frequent travels to Morocco, within a series of encounters with an art group known as the School of Casablanca. The group included Moroccan artists Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chabâa and Mohamed Melehi, the gallerist Pauline De Mazières, founder of l’Atelier, and the Sicilian anthropologist and art critic Toni Maraini. It ultimately seeks to contribute to a wider disciplinary call to reorient modern Italian studies away from Euro-American paradigms, and towards the politics and poetics of the South, here used in its more fluid definition to denote the wider Mediterranean region.