On Hicham Gardaf’s In Praise of Slowness
Text by Dominik Czechowski
In the simmering air
involuntary revolt
of the man present at his
brittleness
– Giuseppe Ungaretti, “Brothers” (1916), translated by Geoffrey Brock
A solitary human figure keeps moving away from the static camera into a desolate landscape. The man carries an oversized bundle of empty plastic bottles on his shoulders. He slightly bends under the weight of the large dragonfly-like construction as he trudges toward, and vanishes behind, the horizon line. The scene takes on a peculiar sci-fi connotation, the protagonist enacting almost an otherworldly creature. He is an extra-terrestrial in a Pasolinian wasteland. Then the film cuts as the man reappears, first approaching and then entering a modern city with its industrial chimneys and factory buildings. The sequences maintain a temporal and spatial continuity with both ambient noise (Magicicada singing, street cars passing, stray dogs barking) and non-diegetic sound (composed by sound artist Hannan Jones). Jointly, these create a ravishing sonic spectrality, a heightened psychological, not just a physical, space.
Such is the opening scene of Hicham Gardaf’s new film In Praise of Slowness. Shot on location in modern-day Tangier, it captures the experiences of vernacular traditions in contemporary space and time. At first glance, Moroccan city’s industrial landscape evokes that in Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), a study of urban monotony and alienation[1]. In his unromanticised bleak vision of a manufacturing inferno, the Italian filmmaker portrayed the modern malaise and industrial pollution as something seductively beautiful. This is echoed in Gardaf’s own visual palette and cinematography, where colour and light lead to a chromatic cooling of the picture, resulting in delicately bleached quality, grainy and imperfect on 16mm film, which nevertheless retains the phenomenological clarity of the image. Giuliana, Antonioni’s neurotic heroine, is profoundly affected by the anxiogenic urban fabric that enstranges and depresses her causing an even greater psychological fragility as she wanders aimlessly through the grim surroundings of a power generation plant. Whilst she is caught between despair, withdrawal, and resignation, the condition of the man in Gardaf’s film is entirely different. This ‘Man with a Hundred Bottles’[2] is a working-class hero, not a phantom in an industrial desert[3]. He is part of the supply chain of bleach street sellers who have become integral to daily life of Tangier over the decades. Gardaf’s lead character collects empty bottles, then delivers them to another person, so they can be sold on to actual bleach vendors in this cyclical motion of labour productivity. According to one of the vendors that the artist encountered, bleach – the popular disinfectant liquid and antimicrobial agent based on water and the chemical sodium hypochlorite used for domestic and cleaning purposes – has known an increase in demand since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic[4]. Despite this, there’s a palpable ongoing disappearance of the street trading in the wake of the city’s modernisation. Subjugated to advanced technology’s impact on everyday life and the forces of capitalist deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari) with its politics of destabilisation and erosion, Tangier, a hybrid city with its ever-expanding industrial zones, is undergoing an unprecedented social transformation and accelerated urbanisation. In such a place, some may regard the bleach vendors – usually middle-aged men who in the burning sun roam the narrow and hilly streets, the architecture often disallowing the usage of wheeled carts – as those who are ruining the city’s beauty and charm, disrupting its image of progress and advancement (called ‘success’ in the neoliberal jargon). The bleach sellers usually keep to one neighbourhood and make the same journey every day, repeating their arduous ritual and upholding the specific civic and cultural characteristics of the old city. The labour and hardships these men must endure are intense, and perhaps unbearable to some neighbours, inhabitants, or those in power.
Accompanying the Man with a Hundred Bottles on his journeys across the city and highlighting some of the job’s aspects, Gardaf’s approach is that of a compassionate observer, one that follows in the footsteps of his great predecessors such as the already mentioned Antonioni, whose early neorealist documentary shorts Gente del Po (1947) and N.U. (Nettezza urbana) (1948) portrayed desperate poverty and hard conditions simple fishermen and street cleaners bore in post-war Italy. Antonioni’s subjects were not just the people, but also the landscape, the site, the place, and the ways in which architecture and natural environment framed and affected human activities. By no deliberate choice, such approach is reflected in Gardaf’s film which similarly focuses on the cityscape more than the actual sellers. This is due to informality and precarity of the traders’ economic and cultural position in hypercapitalism, and the global sociopolitical hierarchies that affect vernacular identities. When working on the project, the artist made several failed attempts to persuade sellers to be filmed. But perilousness and anonymity of these jobs with no legal regulations and the vendors’ fear of their labour being erased or banned, made it hard to find or speak to them[5]. Gardaf’s film may also be corresponding with the work of French filmmaker Alain Cavalier who in a series of short documentaries made between 1988-92 portrayed women’s labour, namely handwork trades and disappearing work practices (a florist, a lavatory attendant, a mattress maker, amongst others). Cavalier observed the tools, the hands and the environment of those women, affirming rare or endangered professions. Not many decades later, bleach sellers similarly are facing a gradual extinction. In Praise of Slowness examines the politics of a tradition on the brink of being forgotten, or lost. The work meditates on the nature of vanishing jobs and how these still hold the power to disrupt and reject the ruling modes of consumption in a capitalist culture.
The film continues Gardaf’s artistic and political inquiry into the experiences and spaces of (un)belonging and identity. His recent work F(I/U)GUE (2022), an essayistic and lyrical film-prose deals with themes such as uprootedness, homesickness, and the condition of dépaysement – a sense of dislocation, a feeling of not being at home (although home, as memorably contemplated upon by Baldwin, is “perhaps…not a place but simply an irrecoverable condition”[6]). Earlier photographic projects such as Intersections (2014-ongoing), The Red Square (2014-2016), and Records of a Vanishing Structure (2016-2021) document the processes of disappearing and erosion and engage with the concept of terrain vague (Ignasi de Solà-Morales). It describes spaces of abandonment and social transformation – suburbs and peripheries, often deemed unproductive, indiscernible, or ambiguous in a city of constant change (deserted streets, stark residual thresholds, surreal landscapes of metropolitan outskirts, bizarre parcels of land, the haughty charm of old or dilapidating architecture). After Perec, who paid attention to mundane and un-extraordinary spaces – the ‘infra-ordinary’ or the ‘endotic’[7] (spaces without use) – the artist explores how such liminal topographies may become interstices of freedom and utopian potentiality, an alternative to totalising forms of finance capital.
The accomplished visual vocabulary present in all Gardaf’s work, with his particular use of and sensitivity for colour, mobilises the formal properties and the allegorical poetics that both moving image and photography share[8]. Carefully employed visual, aural, and spatial modalities (light, composition, colour, tone, rhythm, synergies and dichotomies between surfaces and textures, metaphorically and sonically discordant or harmonising voices) facilitate the construction of spatiality that runs counter to the monolithic capitalist perception (performance) of time, instead re-attuning us to the experience of time according to past traditions and marginalised communities. It is these multiple temporalities, coexistent forms of presence, and the peripheral, that can be empowering and emancipating. As bell hooks poignantly proposes, marginality is the site of radical openness and possibility but also a space for resistance[9]. Unsung or underappreciated labour of bleach vendors creates ‘an edge’ for resistance – a quest for slowness against capitalist time and the regime of invisibilisation.
In Gardaf’s new film, loud male sounds (shoutouts that derive from the word ‘lejía’ – ‘bleach’ in Spanish – whose use is particular to the northern part of Morocco) with which the sellers announce their presence and product availability, act as critical interruptions and moments of rupture – precise, sonorous, reverberating. The men’s sonic resistance transcends the visual and the material world, transforming our experience of the film into a sculptural installation. The shoutouts qualify for what Adriana Cavarero calls “vocal ontology of uniqueness”[10] – the ‘I am here’, communicating the men’s subjectivity, rendering them visible, audible (literally: heard) in an ideologically transmuting urban habitat. Such men keep on carrying on with their tasks, continually ascertaining their right to the public space and the city. Their presence repeatedly politicises capitalism’s intentionally neutralised space, demonstrating the importance of the embodied voice within it (“the body of the voice / the voice of the body”, as Meredith Monk put it[11]). The bleach vendors’ movements across the cityscape create a choreography (chorography) of resilience. Their errant counterbodies destabilise the city’s increasingly homogeneous and fixed spatiality, inserting kinetic and vocal asymmetries and irregularities into urban topography. Gardaf speaks about such resistant tactics in relation to speed, specifically how “the act of waiting for the street sellers to pass by allows for a time frame — in which one does 'nothing' — to exist. It almost acts as a brake against the speed, frenziness and the side effects of capitalism”.[12] Both constituted by, but also constituting the city, these subjects disobediently negotiate between the body and the urban space in performative disruptions of city life, which recall actions by Brazilian modernist architect and cultural organiser Flávio de Carvalho, committed to promoting ‘other’ manners of producing and inhabiting our cities (anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchy, anti-racist, and their intersections).
In his short text “Capitalism as Religion” written in 1921, and unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime, he states that,
“in capitalism, things have a meaning only in their relationship to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology. It is from this point of view that utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones. This concretization of cult is connected with a second feature of capitalism: the permanence of the cult. Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans rêve et sans merci (without dream or mercy). There are no ‘weekdays’. There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper”[13],
showing that the system has no forgiveness or truce. It is an extreme and perpetual cultic religion that knows no pause. Perhaps therefore, within the cinematic space of Gardaf’s latest project – a support infra-structure – we can find a moment of respite, a shelter from the neoliberal storm. In Praise of Slowness offers an un-nostalgic eulogy to those who fall behind, who decelerate the speed of contemporaneity, and who challenge the disappearance of manual labour or traditional occupations[14]. Harnessing audio, visual and literary properties (fragments of self-authored text as voiceover) and vernacular subaltern aesthetics, Gardaf has created a space of dissent that reappraises and visibilises ‘other’ bodies, voices, gestures, and appearances, one which proposes a slowness that produces desynchronisation to the post- and neo-colonial social and spatial orders. It seems that these days no (other) act can be more radical than slowness – understood not as sluggishness (or lethargy), but loosing speed, braking – and how curative slowness might be a tool of restoration against the systemic pressures that condition our contemporary experience of time, of being constantly present. In his film, Gardaf allows for visual intermissions (image subtraction). There are solid black frames punctuating the flow of images, offering moments of a temporal and spatial suspension. The film both depicts and enacts resistance, reconstituting a collective memory of bleach vendors to reignite imaginative energy and solidarity.
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[1] Gardaf had Antonioni’s first colour film in mind while scouting for locations in the industrial district of Tangier. Email correspondence with the author, 3 September 2022.
[2] One of the few titles that the artist considered for the piece was “The Weight of a Hundred Bottles”. Email correspondence with the author, 25 July 2022.
[3] He is somewhat reminiscent of the ‘King of the Tin Cans’ in British artist Ben Rivers’ experimental film The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015), a sun-drenched phantasmagoria shot on locations in Morocco.
[4] Op. cit., email correspondence of 25 July.
[5] In addition, most of the vendors do not own mobile phones. Attempted in-person visits to their houses often remain the only form of contact. Conversation with the author, 12 Sept 2022.
[6] James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956), London: Penguin Books, 1991, p. 88.
[7] Georges Perec, “Approaches to What?” (1973), in: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Trans. John Sturrock. London, England; New York, N.Y., USA: Penguin Books, 1997, pp. 205-207.
[8] There are several ‘colour ‘photographers that could be listed here as points of references, such as Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz and William Eggleston, as well as artists interested in the relationship between photography and painting, including Josepf Albers, Gerard Richter, and Edward Hopper.
[9] “For me this space of radical openness is a margin – a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a 'safe' place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.” bell hooks, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness", in: The Journal of Cinema and Media, No. 36 (1989), pp. 15-23.
[10] Adriana Cavarero, "3.2 A Vocal Ontology of Uniqueness", in: For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2005, pp. 173-182.
[11] D. Jowitt (ed.), Meredith Monk, Baltimore-London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, pp. 56-57.
[12] Op. cit., email correspondence of 3 September.
[13] Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion”, in: Selected Writings Vol.1 1913–1926. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard Press, 1996, p. 288.
[14] According to some, soon professions such cashiers, truck drivers, or even teachers may disappear completely due to automation and AI