Constellations and Threads: Yto Barrada

In our seventh issue, we are honoured to feature French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, who represents France at the 61st Venice Biennale, opening on May 6, 2026. Curator Sarah Allen, Head of Programmes at the South London Gallery, contributes an in-depth essay on Barrada’s practice, emerging at the threshold of safety and desire — the central theme of this issue.

Yto Barrada’s work is a practice of tending that unfolds at a meeting point between safety and desire. For twenty years her work has attended to a fertile terrain: borders, subversive strategies and buried histories.

Yet her tending also extends outward to entire organizations which she has imagined and built – rescuing a period cinema and opening North Africa's first cultural centre La Cinémathèque de Tanger, nearly twenty years ago, and more recently founding The Mothership, a dye garden, retreat, and residency space overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar. In Barrada’s hands, histories, spaces, and communities take root.

Tending to Tangier, the place where she grew up and to which her art continually returns is a through-line in her work. But what does it mean to place yourself as the artist once described “amidst the violence of homecoming.” Barrada’s project A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project, 1999–2003 documented those who desire departure – the so-called “burners”, who burn their official papers before making the journey across the Strait in small boats, bound for the Spanish coast — a shore that is devastatingly close yet just out of reach. Many desires motivate these departures: safety, certainly, but also control — the choice to embrace exile in order to reclaim agency, no matter the peril. It’s a feeling that reverberates today in the hearts of many who risk everything to cross seas and borders in the promise of a better life.

Borders, whether formed by nature or by political will, preoccupy Barrada. This extends to perimeters, defensive structures — thresholds of both safety and exclusion. The artwork Tangier Island Wall (2019) takes us back to Tangier, though a very different Tangier. This time to Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia (USA), which is sinking, succumbing to the forces of coastal erosion and rising sea levels. The residents rely on crab fishing yet deny the existence of climate change. They have long wished for a seawall to protect them, but Barrada’s purposely porous wall of crab traps is no match for mother nature. The work is also a poignant reminder of the deeply dangerous rhetoric which recasts questions of migration as ones of threat and security, that willfully forgoes addressing the root cause of migration in favour of a border wall — a simplified physical shorthand for sovereignty and symbolic separation between “us” and “them”.

What does it mean to write about safety in relation to Barrada’s work in the wake of a war that has devastated Gaza? Barrada is never one to stick to “safe” narratives. Her work Colour Problems: Tintin in Palestine I & II (2025) exhumes the buried history of one episode of Tintin magazine. Some may recall The Land of Black Gold, the 1970s version of this tale, but its original incarnation from the 1930s was a very different story set in the British Mandate of Palestine, one that named the Irgun, the Jewish paramilitary group, and acknowledged the colonial tensions of its time. When it was republished in Britain in the 1970s, those references disappeared. A complex account of colonialism and resistance was reduced to a fictional tale of Arab protagonists in conflict. What desires motivated the edits? What realities were erased in the pursuit of a “safer” narrative? 

Barrada uses the grid as a visual expression of political redaction. She does so by channelling another act of erasure — that of American artist, writer, and philanthropist Emily Vanderpoel, whose pioneering book on color theory, one of the first by a female author, languished out of print for over a century. At a time when color theory was a male-dominated field, Vanderpool’s strategy of subversion was to frame her studies within the domain of gardening, dressmaking, and interior design. However, her form of color analysis was revolutionary at its time and anticipated the work of artists decades later, such as Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian. Barrada applies Vanderpoel’s color analysis system to two similar scenes from the 1930s and 1970s version of the Tintin cartoon. This abstrac ts the color from each plate into component colors; Barada then makes gridded textile pieces based on this color analysis. The final artworks become studies in the politics of erasure.

The dyes used to color this work were extracted from plants grown at Barrada’s Mothership. Nowhere is a desire towards tending more embodied than here. Mothering takes the form of care for the land where plants threatened with extinction are cultivated at a moment when green spaces in Tangier are vanishing. The Mothership is both a sanctuary and a statement — a site of cultural and ecological resistance, a place where knowledge is seeded and re-seeded. It is a refuge and retreat in a world that demands speed and extraction. It is also a space for artistic kinship and collective resilience — after all, it is deeply human to desire safety in the relationships we choose to water.

Barrada’s desire to tend to human connection and artistic kinship finds one of its ultimate expressions in her close relationship with American artist Bettina Grossman. Grossman lived for almost five decades in the Chelsea Hotel in New York until her death in 2021, leaving behind an extraordinary body of work. In her early 90s, Grossman granted access to Barrada to excavate her guarded archives — an act of profound trust. Safety can also mean guardianship and after Grossman’s passing, Barrada became the steward of her archive, working to preserve, exhibit, and safeguard it against the silence that so often engulfs the legacies of women artists. Through this act of care, Barrada continues her lifelong practice of tending — to her core constellation of artistic concerns as well as to place, people, community and the inseparable continuities between art and life.