Bonne Route

Born in 1989, Nassim Azarzar is a young artist and art director based in Rabat, Morocco. His early work focused on the question of the image in media, and its relationship to truth and politics.

In 2014 Azarzar launched Atelier Superplus, an experimental graphic design studio with his partner Guillaume de Ubéda aka Deep Nalstrom.

Following this project, he co-founded in 2017 Atelier Kissaria in Tangier in a shared workshop with the visual artist Yto Barrada. Atelier Kissaria is a workshop dedicated to handmade experimental printing practices. These projects have marked a turn toward social and visual projects that engage with the socio-cultural contexts in which Azarzar works, taking inspiration from the urban and visual histories of Morocco, and read through contemporary political contexts.

He is a member of QANAT which is a collective of multidisciplinary artists and researchers exploring the politics and poetics of water in Morocco and beyond, as a way to address and engage in the making and remaking of the commons.

Azarzar’s work approaches philosophical and historical questions through a range of visual forms, media, and social engagement.

He is as much inspired by natural structures observable in nature, and by Alan Turing’s mathematically modeled approach to natural forms, as he is by the genealogies of shapes and patterns that characterize the history of Islamic art and Moroccan art. Observing the movement of art in new social and cultural spaces, and onto novel surfaces and materials in cities and urban spaces, he builds upon the ideas promulgated by Moroccan artists and intellectuals in 1960’s meant to disentangle colonial history from modern Moroccan art.

This design is the result of a research I'm doing named “Bonne Route”. This project experiments with the social meanings of popular aesthetics by collaborating with painters and craftsmen who stand at the origin of the rich ornamentation of Moroccan transport trucks. I'm focusing on a visual culture that emerges outside of capitalist economies and challenges the disciplinary spaces of art, this work meditates on a local contemporary esthetic. This shirt is kind of a statement on different things that I'm interested in right now.