At the Power Plant, a souk with a point of view

Here, we find the source of such things: Louis Lyautey, who presided over the expansion of French colonial forces in Morocco in the early 20th century and would become its Resident-General up to 1925. Lyautey, remembered by the French as The Maker of Morocco, was a good colonialist like all the rest. In off-the-rack ruling-class fashion, he imagined a future for his subjects built on commodifying their ancient traditions for a European market. Hence, here, the Berbers, which for centuries served as desert survival gear, refitted for today’s most trend-setting homes.

Those who detect a page ripped from Lyautey’s playbook on our own patch of contested land here in Canada wouldn’t be wrong. Starting in the 1930s, the federal Department of Indian Affairs, in one of their many failed Indigenous anti-poverty schemes, saw in the mass production of traditional craftwork — basket-weaving, beading, carving, you name it — a potentially booming tchotchke industry.

Failing to realize — or more accurately, perhaps, care — that value in those cultures was rarely measured in dollars, production increased as cultural relevance declined. “Indian artists were persuaded to produce only what was economically practical, overlooking authenticity,” wrote Gerald McMaster, OCAD University’s Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Visual Culture, when he was a curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. Anyone who’s recently been to an airport gift shop in Canada knows the hangover from such times is long and lingering, with throwaway trinkets bearing totemic forms remaining a prevalent currency in a brisk tourist trade.

Bleakly, twas ever thus: Colonialism is many things, none of them good, and cultural identity being defined by a dominant, usually European other is one of its imposingly ugly pillars. (One of Barrada’s poster works lays it plain: “I Am Not Exotic. I Am Exhausted” it reads).

The result is a trumped-up, saleable version of a culture being passed off as authentic, and it cuts an easy path to convenient simplification, blurring past and present, perception and reality, in a hazy pastiche of easy presumptions. One of Barrada’s video works here shows how the Moroccan government itself became in on the deal: Hastily made temporary facades lined the travel routes of major cities when dignitaries visited, satisfying romantic expectations when reality just wouldn’t do.

The magic of Barrada’s work here, though, isn’t the pushback on such things so much as her working within that fog to tease out a larger truth. Barrada, who lives in Tangiers and is deeply embedded in its workaday, non-tourist reality— her mother runs Darna, a local non-profit that works with disadvantaged families — embraces the easy hucksterism, evolved from the Lyautey imperative, as her homeland’s outward expression of self.

Barrada’s title, Faux Guides, tells much: Levered, like First Nations here, from a traditional way of life and into a European mode of commodity capitalism, Moroccans found inventive ways of participating in Lyautey’s new economy. In the late 19th and early 20th century, a burgeoning modernity went hand-in-hand with an explosion of science, and Morocco, then a Sultanate of broadly knit tribes, was bursting with dinosaur bones and fossils.

Lyautey’s market-driven mandate spawned a cottage industry: Handmade fake fossils, whose makers became practiced enough to fool even the expert eye. It’s a practice that’s still thriving today — the late, celebrated paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould published a book inspired by it, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, in 2000 — though more for the benefit of daytripping sunburned British tourists, who arrive by the boatload from nearby Gibraltar, than for natural historians.

This, more than anything, is Barrada’s target. If you’ve ever stepped off the boat in Tangiers, you’ll know the scene: Throngs of would-be guides, eager to offer mint tea, a visit to a souk, or an array of surprisingly plentiful souvenirs of Morocco’s prehistory. For the tourist trade here, authenticity is whatever you can get away with, and the reversal would give anyone with an ounce of social justice in their soul cause to smile: Here, ripping off tourists smacks only of turnabout being fair play.

And play Barrada does: In the gallery, fossils, real and fake both, are put on display alongside crude stone-cutting tools used to make them. Alongside, slices and blocks of orthoceras stone riven with ancient trilobite hides have been fashioned into disks, plates, and in one instance, replica Coca-Cola bottles.

It’s the value proposition of authenticity turned upside-down: Tourists buy fake fossils, thinking them of the deep prehistorical ground on which they stand, then real ones in the form of kitschy pop-bottle carvings, which connect to nothing but the moment they’re in.

It’s Morocco’s post-Lyauty subsistence economy in action, refit for the global tourist trade. But in a sly subversion, it’s the victims, not the victors, that come out on top. These are fictive histories for sale, bent to the will of a narrowcast notion of economic development.

The beneficiaries of the deception here are the people upon whom it was imposed, and that’s the kernel of virtue at the core of a gruesome absurdity: Of the arrogant paternalism of one nation deciding it knows what’s best for another, a reality we in Canada know all too well. When deliberate deception becomes a model to which to aspire, that’s a problem. Can we talk?

Yto Barrada’s Faux Guides continues at the Power Plant to Jan. 2, 2017. For more information please see www.thepowerplant.org