With craft on the rise in contemporary art, the degree to which craft and art venture into each other’s territories has become increasingly political. When craft practices are adopted within fine art practice, their redefinition sometimes works to undermine the masculinist and white supremacist underpinnings of Western aesthetic hierarchies. Alternatively, such elisions can function as appropriation, allowing artists with institutional power to take what they want from marginalized communities. In the case of North Africa, a recent exhibition by Yto Barrada at the American Academy in Rome offers a critical account of how visual motifs and material practices become divorced from each other in transit, and emphasizes the generative potential of bringing them back together as a source of resistance. Barrada’s small, two-room exhibition, curated by Peter Benson Miller, caps her stint as the Roy Lichtenstein Fellow at the Academy in the fall of 2017. The first room in the exhibition, shown in Figure 1, is a darkened projection space for Tree Identification for Beginners (2017), a 36-minute work of stop-motion animation. In the 16mm film transferred to digital projection, Montessori toys appear to have come to life, wood and plastic shapes in primary colors slouching and slithering across the screen. Having bucked their child overlords, the autonomous toys pop into configurations and then shimmy free, accompanied by satisfying clicking and clinking sounds. Overlaid on this small revolt are readings of archival materials relating to a trip made by Barrada’s mother, Mounira Bouzid, across the United States in 1966. She was invited to the country as part of Operation Crossroads Africa, a

中文翻译：

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Yto Barrada的染料花园

随着当代艺术中手工艺的兴起，手工艺和艺术进入彼此领域的程度变得越来越政治化。当在美术实践中采用工艺实践时，它们的重新定义有时会破坏西方审美等级的男性主义和白人至上主义基础。或者，这种省略可以起到挪用的作用，允许具有机构权力的艺术家从边缘化社区获取他们想要的东西。以北非为例，Yto Barrada 最近在罗马美国学院举办的展览对视觉主题和材料实践如何在运输过程中相互分离提供了批判性的说明，并强调了将它们重新组合在一起的生成潜力阻力的来源。巴拉达的小型两室展览，由彼得·本森·米勒 (Peter Benson Miller) 策划，她于 2017 年秋季在学院担任罗伊·利希滕斯坦 (Roy Lichtenstein) 研究员。如图 1 所示，展览中的第一个房间是一个黑暗的投影空间，用于初学者树木识别（2017 36 分钟的定格动画作品。在转移到数字投影的 16 毫米胶片中，蒙台梭利玩具似乎变得栩栩如生，原色的木头和塑料形状在屏幕上懒散和滑行。在打败了他们的孩子霸主之后，自主玩具会弹出配置，然后自由摆动，伴随着令人满意的咔嗒声和叮当声。覆盖在这场小型叛乱之上的是阅读与巴拉达的母亲穆尼拉·布齐德 (Mounira Bouzid) 1966 年穿越美国旅行有关的档案材料。