City as Canvas

Abstract

The city reflects a politics of possession, upon which pieces of land ultimately get encircled by walls for exploitation. Walls—the entities that frame up the city—are territory ma(r)kers, yet this architectural gesture, far from being innocent, symbolizes a lurking desire at owning territories in the ma(r)king. This paper brings this idea home by examining the other meanings of the wall in contemporary Morocco, by closely studying the poetics and politics of the wall in the context of the Jidar street art festival of Rabat, situated, as it were, in the intersection of concepts (such as festival, paint, street art, wall, patronage, cooptation, resistance, local and global). We argue that the JSAF presents, among other things, a venue for local artists to perform and translate their thoughts and artistic visions into murals of a grand scale. Yet under the gaze of power, their performances accentuate the existentialist yet ambivalent position of city walls not only as embodiments of visual escape, but also as terrains of artistic/economic opportunities, incompatible social emotions, and contentious politics.