MACAAL and Othman Lazraq Draw an International Art Crowd in Marrakech

The Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) first opened in 2016, in time for the Marrakech Climate Change Conference, but in late February this year, the museum underwent something of a relaunch. This time the proceedings catered less to climate warriors than to the international art crowd, many of whom were on hand for the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair—also in Marrakech for the first time. For MACAAL, this grand opening meant a battalion of press flown in from around the globe, and a much-buzzed-about fete, with thickly piled Berber-style red rugs, a branded step and repeat, and an all-night dinner and dance party under a marquee for several hundred guests. This was all mostly thanks to the largesse of 29-year-old Othman Lazraq (the son of hotel developer Alami Lazraq, of Groupe Alliances), who serves as MACAAL’s president and upon whose family art collection the museum is based. It was a well-deserved moment of celebration: After Zeitz Mocaa (which opened in Cape Town in September 2017), MACAAL is only the second museum on the continent devoted solely to contemporary African art.

Lazraq intends for his museum to function as not just a rainy-day activity for the golf resort and gated community that it borders but a cultural touchstone for the larger population, who will be bused, for free, from the city center to the museum for the first month after the opening. “I wanted to give back [to the people of Marrakech] a place where they can be free and neutral,” said Lazraq on the day of MACAAL’s press preview. “In Morocco we don’t have very many neutral spaces. We have commercial spaces, which are very elitist because you have to have money to get in. A museum is a neutral space.” MACAAL will also have educational outreach programs, workshops in their lab, the biannual photography competition La Chambre Claire (which was founded in 2013 with a few dozen applicants and now has several hundred), and regular couscous dinners open to a large swathe of local people. Why couscous? Because, says Lazraq, “just like couscous, art is meant to be shared with everyone.”

MACAAL’s first temporary exhibition, “Africa Is No Island,” was curated by Jeanne Mercier, Baptiste de Ville d’Avray (cofounders of Afrique in Visu) and Madeleine de Colnet (associate curator), who selected works from 40 established and emerging photographers in an effort to highlight what Lazraq called “the complexity and diversity of Africa.” The exhibition runs throughout the ground floor of the space, which is laid out in a labyrinthine fashion inspired the medinas and replete with a sound installation by the Italian artist Anna Raimondo that brings the everyday “sounds of the souk” indoors. It is an effort, Lazraq says, to provide some sense of place for “the local people, so that they can come and understand and be educated and interested,” adding that “we want to speak the same language.”

Lazraq traces the transformation of his love of photography into something museumworthy to his friendship with the late Moroccan photographer and photojournalist Leila Alaoui, who died from her injuries during the terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in 2016. “I was very young when I started [collecting],” said Lazraq, who has also lived in New York and Switzerland. “I was 20 when I started buying photography with Leila Alaoui, who was one of my closest and best friends, and she introduced me to photography, and this crazy world of . . . fixing a moment of history” in a photograph, the ability to solidify a captured frame into “a moment of strong and powerful work.” At the entrance to MACAAL there is an alcove that functions as a memorial to Alaoui, accompanied by one of her photographs and a mission statement about the forthcoming Leila Alaoui Foundation, which is “being established to safeguard [Alaoui’s] work, stand up for her values,” as well as “inspire and support the art commitment in favor of human dignity.”

Upstairs, the permanent collection includes Billie Zangewa’s embroidered silk tapestry Sun Worshiper in Central Park, 2009; Eric van Hove’s industrial joints and Citroën parts carved from cow bone and copper and teak (one cog cover looking like nothing so much as a human heart); Mounir Fatmi’s tangle of coaxial cables bolted to wood, called Ceux Qui Savent et Ceux Qui ne Savent pas (2008), and Abdoulaye Konaté’s woven West African textiles for Composition en blue ABBA 1, creating an evocative, politically resonant panorama of sunlight glistening on the ocean. In a curtain-enclosed room off the stairwell, accompanied by the piped-in strains of Maria Callas, an elaborately baroque dining room sits entirely covered in wax-paper wrappers, broken bottles, warped tires, magazine pages, crushed soda cans, egg crates, plastic piping, and every possible color and shade of take-out bag, with a small path beaten out of the rubbish for viewers to circumnavigate the scene. It was created by the Zbel Manifesto collective and is called Un Dîner en Ville; it is what their manifesto calls “an invitation to share the contemporary feast of excesses and their derivatives. It questions terrestrial nourishments in all their forms and leads us is to a fundamental question: What nourishes us?” In Calibrated Compositions III, the Casablanca artist Soukaina Aziz El Idrissi, who attended Central Saint Martins in London, also recycled plastic waste by weaving it into translucent hangings that reimagine hotly desired Moroccan carpets and textiles. Man created all this plastic waste, and he also recycled them, Lazraq says, and it is this type of art that he hopes will help educate local people “to understand and be responsible about what earth is—to be proud . . . to respect it. It’s a message of respect and hope.”

“The role of the museum is to engage and to educate people and somehow give just a small touch of light and hope in the messages that we’re spreading,” said Lazraq. “I think Morocco needs it, Africa needs it—we all need it.”