The 53-year-old multimedia artist Yto Barrada grew up in a blue two-story house in a verdant Tangier neighborhood that overlooks the Strait of Gibraltar. About a decade ago, the Moroccan French artist, who also lives in New York City, transformed part of the family compound — including several small structures, as well as an expansive botanical garden that provides the flora she uses to make natural dyes — into what she recently named the Mothership, an experimental arts center where she offers textile and other workshops and hosts artists’ residencies. One of its newest additions, in another small garden up the path from the main street, is a 95-square-foot single-room pinewood caravan, a 50th-birthday gift to Barrada from her husband, the American filmmaker and actor Sean Gullette. “It’s my favorite present ever,” she says.
Gullette modeled the four-wheeled covered wagon after the one that sits behind Gipsy House, the writer Roald Dahl’s former residence in Buckinghamshire, England, in which he wrote “Danny the Champion of the World.” Romany people sometimes lived in this type of caravan, which they called a vardo, beginning in the mid-19th century. Dahl bought his around 1960 and used it as a playhouse for his children.
Barrada’s caravan serves as a guesthouse for visiting artists. After Gullette drew up the initial designs, much of the work was done by teenagers participating in Darna, a nonprofit in Tangier founded by the artist’s mother, Mounira Bouzid El Alami, that provides education and job opportunities to children from low-income families. (One of the organization’s buildings is on Tangier’s main square near Cinémathèque de Tanger, a 1930s movie theater that Barrada revitalized in 2006, turning it into an art house cinema and an archive.) Inside the caravan are a compact sitting area and, at the back, a queen-size bed covered in pillows and draped with fairy lights and pink-and-white striped fabric. “Those are actually bathroom curtains,” says Barrada, who sourced most of the caravan’s furnishings — the Berber rug, the wooden desk — from flea markets around the country.
Last year, one of the artists in residence was the Brooklyn-based Ragini Bhow, who led a metal-embossing workshop and spent 10 days staying in the caravan. Bhow, who often works with fire, burning organic material such as hair and cedar to create ash that she uses in her sculptures, collected and dried bunches of sage, geranium and rosemary from the garden to make smudge sticks. “At the Mothership there is a sense of discovery every day,” she says.