Joséphine Baker and modern architecture across the colonised Arab world
In her video work “Of All the Gin Joints in All the Towns in All the World c...” (2023), compilation of archival images of architecture and fragmentary histories, Ines Weizman traces the itinerary of Josephine Baker (1906–1975), the renowned African-American and French performer, who crisscrossed the Arab world during World War II, from Algiers to Casablanca, Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and British Mandate Palestine. Enlisted by the Free French Army as a spy, she traveled throughout the region in 1941–43, taking to the stage in hotel bars and private clubs, gathering points for officers, refugees, journalists, and agents. Fame gave Baker access to information, as her enemies tended to underestimate her.
Although no photographic record of these performances remains, Weizman has unearthed an immense amount of archival material evocative of this period and the places through which Baker traveled: street scenes in Algiers, bomb-damaged archaeological sites and museums in Tunisia, military bands, US troops in Casablanca—and, most evocatively, the exteriors, ballrooms, and lobbies of early twentieth-century grand hotels. These modernist structures served as markers and meeting points in the colonial world of the Middle East, which Baker navigated. As evidenced by a fading French tricolor painted on the wall of a Haifa casino, these spaces were the backdrop for her fight against fascism, part of her larger struggle against racism and xenophobia that did not end with the war. Related to this video work that was first shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023, Ines Weizman developed a two book projects, several essays and the installation was shown in Berlin and Ryad. Her book Joséphine Baker across the Colonial Modern is being published by Sternberg Press in 2027.
