TANGIER INTERZONE

First time from a “Moroccan point of view”

Curated by Abdelaziz Taleb
produced by The Arab Media Lab project

In the mid-1950s and after, Tangier welcomed many artists, poets and intellectuals. Influenced by Paul Bowles, members of the Beat Generation, came to the northern city to be inspired, to complete their projects and to live the Moroccan dream. Few lived a human dialogue with the locals, but most of them wanted to experience other things in order to expand the language of experience beyond the practical world.

During the “INTERZONE” times in tangier, the East met the West in a debacle of utter incomprehension, each one waiting for the Other’s Answer, the Secret, without being able to find it, because neither one nor the other had it. For some, it was a place of intercultural encounters, and for many others rather the place of a debacle, which signals the failure of the “culturalist” approach to reality.
In Burroughs’s anarchizing vision, cultural identities are always fabricated by bureaucratic dispensaries, which use them strategically. 

In this sense, his remarks on the fiasco of the encounter between East and West coincide with Edward Said’s reflections on a catastrophic reciprocal fantasy. Said’s Orientalism can be read as the story of the making of the Orient by a Western “dispensary” and then of its taking over by Eastern “dispensaries”. What some will find in Tangier is an interstitial space between cultural “pharmacies”.

Via our film program : ” TANGIER INTERZONE “, we will try to explore this frontier between reality and fiction, and discuss the imagenary dimension of this same “reality”