Controversial Exhibit on Casablanca’s Historic Red-Light District Canceled Amid Debate

The exhibition Bousbir: Images and Stories of the Former Restricted District of Casablanca, 1923-2021 will no longer take place. It has been canceled due to Covid-19. "We then asked when the exhibition would reopen. The Almada Foundation [which belongs to the royal family, editor’s note] then announced to us that it was closed due to force majeure," Raphaël Pieroni, a geographer from the University of Geneva, told the newspaper Le Temps. Yet "we had requested all the necessary authorizations and we were in close contact with the foundation," he justifies. In the eyes of the academic and his colleague, Jean-François Staszak, professor at the University of Geneva, both organizers of the exhibition, the sensitivity of the subject would be at the origin of this decision.

The two Unige researchers and their Moroccan associates are saddened by this cancellation. "Three years ago, Emmanuel Macron stated in a speech that colonization was a crime against humanity. I didn’t feel like I was going against the grain," says Jean-François Staszak. I thought we were at a time when things could be said, but that required a political will that exists neither on the Moroccan side nor on the French side." Built in 1923 by the French administration, Bousbir "was the largest open-air brothel in the world. There was a lot of activity, restaurants, a cinema, erotic and pornographic shows. Tourists went there because it was a must-see attraction."

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The district was designed to meet "the expectations of Westerners and therefore to correspond to the image they had of the Moroccan woman, of Morocco, of the Thousand and One Nights," adds Raphaël Pieroni. More than 12,000 women - with an average age of 18 - are said to have lived in Bousbir and officiated there until 1955 under conditions close to forced labor. Some were imprisoned because of debts incurred to pay the rents. "I knew about the existence of prostitution in Bousbir, but I didn’t imagine that. The enormity of the district, it’s really monstrous," sighs Leyla Darrage, a Moroccan, the exhibition’s scenographer. She spent eight months making a model of the district.