Yto Barrada's The Mothership

The Mothership is an artist-led project founded by Yto Barrada that creates space and time for artistic exploration, research, and retreat, all inspired by natural dyes. Based in Tangier, Morocco, the project is envisioned as an “eco-campus” for growing, making, and learning natural dyeing and indigenous traditions, and a place for experimental collective artistic practice through residencies and workshops. The Mothership is “a place to conjure pan-African eco-feminist practices into being.”

History

Barrada grew up in her parents’ home adjacent to the wilder lands which now house the Mothership; in 2003 she moved with her family to live in the Gardener’s House and now shares her time between New York and Tangier. Since then, a growing circle of collaborators and friends have joined her efforts to help envision and manifest The Mothership’s Natural Dye Garden, residency, and education programs.

The Land

The Mothership is situated just 10 minutes from Tangier’s city center and sits on the flank of the legendary Old Mountain, overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar above steep cliffs, where the sun rises over the Mediterranean to the east. On a clear day, southern Spain is visible 23 km due north across the Strait. Two small creeks converge at the bottom of the property, and a secluded path leads down to the rocks and the waters of the Strait.

At the botanical crossroads of Africa, the Arab world, and Europe, Northern Morocco’s rich biodiversity is evident throughout the site of The Mothership. Indigenous plants grow alongside varieties planted over the years by local and international gardeners, including an assortment of dye plants. There are several types of eucalyptus growing, as well as native trees, including local pines, walnuts, acacias, palms, Portuguese laurels, and ferns and oaks from the Rif. A huge, iconic 150-year-old Moreton Bay fig tree centers the valley garden next to the main house.

Adjacent to The Mothership is the 70-hectare Perdicaris Park, once owned by Ion Hanford Perdicaris, a wealthy Greek American who, like the Moroccan, Phoenician, Roman, Spanish, and French transplanters before him, introduced a variety of new plant species. The city of Tangier took possession of this forest in the 20th century, and it is now maintained and laid out with marked paths for the inhabitants of Tangier and visitors to the city.

The City of Tangier

Located on the northernmost tip of Africa, Tangier has historically been a place of trade and exchange between North Africa and Southern Europe. Once a strategic Berber town, the city was fought over by colonial powers keen to control the narrow straits linking the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1920s, Tangier was designated an international zone, ushering in a period as a cosmopolitan hub for artists, adventurers, writers, diplomats, and exiles. The city gained notoriety in the 1950s when Paul and Jane Bowles and William Boroughs settled there, becoming a magnet for key figures of the Beat Generation including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and for many writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians in the 1960s and ‘70s. From the 1930s to the ‘60s, the site of The Mothership was home to the Scottish painter James McBey and his American wife Marguerite McBey.

Natural Dye Garden

The Dye Garden, located along planted terraces on the property, grows a selection of indigenous and historical plants used to produce dyes and pigments, for textiles, watercolors, and lacquers. The plants are seasonally harvested and processed, generating a micro-production of natural dyes and pigments—deep blue from indigo, red from madder roots, yellow from coreopsis, oxalis, and cosmos.

In conjunction with the education and residency programs, the Dye Garden also acts as a laboratory and a living library for the study of dye plants, their growing cycles, and the different processes of creating color.

The Dye House

Along with interior architect (opens in a new window) Marion Mailaender, Yto created The Dye House, which serves as The Mothership’s main studio and as a space for artistic and scientific exploration, research, and production using natural dyes. It includes a dye lab equipped with traditional and state-of-the-art facilities and tools for natural dyeing, a space for exhibitions and lectures, and a textile library based on Barrada’s personal archive of Moroccan and international textiles and fabrics.

To learn more about the mothership, visit (opens in a new window) mothershiptangier.org
The Mothership is supported by (opens in a new window) Artangel.