IN FOCUS
The newly completed building gives these words tangible form. Upon arrival, the visitor encounters the surviving historic wall along the main street, preserved behind a glass enclosure and, in Ando’ s conception, oriented towards the future. The intervention does not betray the architect’ s fundamental principle: that buildings should exist in symbiosis with their surroundings. Crossing the entrance, one is welcomed in a manner reminiscent of the traditional Moroccan house, whose architecture is invariably oriented inwards. At the center of the building, a large sliding skylight opens onto the courtyard. Stones salvaged from the former caravanserai have been retained in the arch framing the main entrance and incorporated elsewhere in the interior, allowing circulation through the building to echo, in spirit, the movement and life of the site in earlier times.
The museum’ s inaugural exhibition, titled Casa, was devoted to Casablanca. That abbreviation encompasses an entire program. It speaks to a desire to claim a city in perpetual motion— a city woven from individual and collective histories, familiar yet elusive; a city of memories and dreams, a stage for the decisive conflict between what has been and what is yet to come.
The exhibition was conceived as a sensory journey rather than a linear historical narrative. It invites visitors to explore the multiple layers that define Casablanca’ s human identity. Historical photographs, archival materials, and contemporary artworks converge across the galleries, bringing different eras and perspectives into dialogue.
In one of the ground-floor galleries, At the Origins of Photography transports visitors to the early twentieth century, offering an intimate encounter with Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz( 1878 – 1943), whose fascination with technological innovation marked a decisive moment in the history of imagery in Morocco.
From there, the exhibition moves among retrospectives, thematic presentations and scenes captured spontaneously during a wander through the city.
Through its constant ruptures and perpetual reinvention, Casablanca emerges as a city of shared belonging, where ethnic, social and confessional differences intersect, interact and continually recombine within a vast urban melting pot that has, over time, become profoundly cosmopolitan.
At the center of one gallery, a display case presents booklets created by twelve poets and writers, each paired with a photographer, and devoted to the city where they were born or came to adopt as their own.
Elsewhere, a series of photographs in warm, sun-burnished tones— tending towards sepia and bistre— brings together images of the entrance doors of buildings from another era, many distinguished by finely wrought ironwork. Taken together, they evoke the extraordinary urban adventure of Casablanca in the 1930s. Their enduring visual beauty recalls, in unexpected ways, the legendary Vienna of the turn of the century.
Across nearly 870 square meters, on the ground floor and above, countless snapshots unfold across urban scenes, summoning vanished moments of a collective history and expressing, with all the subjectivity and fascination of the photographic gaze, a city that is constantly changing and perpetually beyond reach-a city to which a museum, embedded in its ancient core, has just given an added soul.
Mustapha Nissabouri is a renowned Moroccan poet and art critic who helped shape modern Moroccan literature. Beyond writing, he was deeply involved in the Casablanca Art School movement in the 1960s, collaborating with prominent local artists including Farid Belkahia.
Museum of Photography and Visual Arts, Casablanca © National Foundation of Museums of Morocco
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