L’Atelier de l’Observatoire: The Collective Museum

Collective presents The Collective Museum: Citizen project for a museum of collective memory, a new exhibition from Casablanca-based contemporary art organisation L’Atelier de l’Observatoire. L’Atelier de l’Observatoire design, produce and disseminate projects which support Moroccan contemporary creativity, nationally and internationally. 

The Collective Museum consists of a series of acts of recovery and collection of documents, photographs, objects, films, and memories from places, predominantly in Casablanca, facing demolition, dereliction or reappropriation. These include domestic, family spaces and abandoned or former public spaces. 

This project builds on the artist and co-founder of Atelier de l’Observatoire Mohamed Fariji’s previous project, The Imaginary Aquarium, which attempted to reactivate the former Casablanca aquarium. Fariji worked with participants to create a collective memory of site through the process of gathering, salvaging and researching. This approach, developed in The Collective Museum, offers an alternative way of writing history, with a focus on individual and group stories.

Since Collective moved to Calton Hill, Edinburgh, in 2013 we have worked with artists to question what a City Observatory can be and how we can explore the hidden narratives of our new home on the City Observatory site. The Collective Museum project offers an alternative framework to scrutinise precarious public and domestic urban space through story, observation, memory and objects. 

L’Atelier de l’Observatoire is a space for art and research developing participative and socially engaged projects involving artists, researchers and the general public. The organisation experiments with alternative approaches through different programs and formats such as talks, researches, workshops, exhibitions, trainings, film restorations, artwork production and publications.