Voices from Marrakesh” (2023)

We write messages on walls. Thoughts, hints, wishes. We colour them in and leave everything as it is. Time looks at our messages and tells the wind not to extinguish them quickly. And the sun shines on them and people pass by and the messages remain. They bear witness to our thoughts and instructions and pleas and longings for years, decades.

Nobody notices them any more, thousands pass them by carelessly.

“Traces on the Wall” brings the fading signs to the surface, makes them visible and brings them into new relationships with the viewer. The silent wishes and commands, the fantasies and banalities – they arise anew with the artist’s eye.

The walls of houses, building boards, doors or barrels all harbour handprints, so to speak, and thus always traces of thought. People have worked here, have left behind spiritual things that have become material. For example, they abandoned an olive oil factory and left it to decay. Decades later, the ruins are still there. The traces remain. Weathered, they bear witness to the fact that work was done here, that someone left a message. For whom? For the wind? For the pigeons sitting under the roofs? For the cats that creep over the rubbish?

These are messages that turn from spirit to material and then decompose, turn yellow and fade away. A cycle that makes people small – shows them small. The excerpts from the handmade messages show that it is only seconds of an eternity in which we can leave something, bequeath something, write something down.

And yet only people write things down. They paint over, brush over, stick over and nail things up. No dog, no snake, no donkey does that.

But aren’t we donkeys too?

Love and pain and rebellion and resignation – EVERYTHING can be found on the walls. Found, passed, reapplied, passed again.

Is it men who immortalise themselves here?

You never see women on the wall. Is there no room for them here? Who knows?

The grease of the machines, the tangy oil of the olives, the traces of production can be found in the halls and houses. It happens that lubricating oil or pigeon shit melts messages, covers them up. This is how the tides of life work together, against each other. You can see this inconspicuous, tenacious struggle if you look closely enough.

Recognise the young man who has immortalised himself here in the sweep of the painting. See the factory worker, the cook, the cleaning lady who has added another layer to eternity, who has covered up, spilt or wiped away what has gone before.

We always see the moment when we can recognise it. But we do not know the predecessor. What we see are colours, paper and wall remnants, poster foils and mortar splashes, tin flags and plastic tarpaulins. Everything yellows and fades, but everything is there now. Tomorrow? We don’t know.

The walls of the city are the unnoticed testimony of the city.

The proof that life is and life was. Otherwise stone would be here and earth. And only the wind drew its figures in the material. In the city, man draws. Recognising this is the pleasure of these pictures.

Why did someone destroy the poster? What was he or she thinking, going over the paint of a building panel with a nail (?)? Is it always men who change, affix, destroy, paint over?

What do women do with the walls? Look at them, thousands pass by, day after day. 

Here on the walls are the messages that Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti wrote down 55 years ago. They are “The Voices from Marrakech”. In 14 chapters, he describes scenes and voices from the “Red City”.

Stamuli found the voices on the walls of the houses.