Root Down

There are no actual trees in Tree Identification for Beginners, the latest film by the Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. The absence is curious given not only the title, but the central role trees and other foliage have played in several of the artist’s projects over nearly two decades, as part of a diverse and interdisciplinary practice that incorporates photography, sculpture, print, and installation. Whether literal or symbolic, the arboreal in Barrada’s work can serve as a means of resistance or of decorative posturing, opening onto questions of familial lineage, colonialism, and urban development.

Nestled in the hyphen between “home” and “grown,” Barrada’s varied oeuvre continually and deceptively interpellates global questions of social and political development within seemingly small-scale points of inquiry, chief among them her own family. Living between Paris and Tangier, the artist frequently returns to questions concerning the circulation of people and capital through the use of symbols and metaphors, like the palm trees that appear throughout her work: a species non-native to North Africa that both references and represents the region’s past colonial interventions.

The palm centres Barrada’s brief and unadorned from 2009 (part of the larger ), in which she hired and documented a trio of workers as they reinforced the roots of a nearly collapsed tree in a lot on the outskirts of Tangier. Situated in an area of the city that had seen increased speculation from developers,