Oliver Ressler
AFTER THE BARRAGE, THE DELUGE
Austria, Switzerland, Morocco, 2022, 28 min.
The film discusses two areas in Casablanca where major infrastructure projects have caused social upheaval on a huge scale.
The first of these projects is now almost complete: directly in front of the Medina – the old city with its narrow streets and small shops – a massive kilometer-long seawall was built, cutting inhabitants off from the sea. A new urban panorama of concrete and glass was then built on top of the seawall, dominated by the shopping mall Casablanca Marina.
The beach from which locals once fished has disappeared entirely, replaced by a wall of concrete. The enclosure of the seashore means even the view of the sea has come to be controlled and confined by private capital.
The second urban development scheme is located within sight of the Hassan 2 Mosque, Africa’s largest mosque since its completion in 1993. The neighborhood chosen for Projet de D’Avenue Royale consists of low-income and collapsed houses, some in the process of demolition. In the midst of the debris, evicted residents live in tents and self-built shanties without running water or electricity. Many of these people can’t afford or don’t want to move to the outskirts of this city of 4 million inhabitants, far from their informal jobs and local survival networks. The outcome of their ongoing struggles will reveal whether the government was indeed able to impose yet another capital-friendly international showcase, reproducing a wider geography of inequality.
“After the Barrage, the Deluge” (Après le barrage, le déluge) insists on the potential of opposition, taking the wrecker-king Louis XV (“Après moi, le deluge”) at his word. A wall built to repel the sea and expel the poor – a barrage in the double sense of onslaught and barricade – can always be overwhelmed by the flood-tides of social struggle.
Oliver Ressler
produces installations, projects in public space, and films on economics, democracy, racism, climate breakdown, forms of resistance and social alternatives. He has completed forty-two films that have been screened in thousands of events of social movements, art institutions and film festivals. Ressler had comprehensive solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; SALT Galata, Istanbul; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville. He has participated in more than 400 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris and the biennials in Taipei, Lyon, Gyumri, Venice, Athens, Quebec, Jeju, Kyiv and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 (exhibition organized by EMST). In 2002, Ressler won the first prize at the International Media Art Award of the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016.
