Marrakech is getting a new exhibition, and this one sits somewhere between photography, history, travel and fashion-world aesthetics.
The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech is opening “In the Footsteps of Odette du Puigaudeau,” an exhibition dedicated to the French explorer, ethnologist and writer whose life took her across the Sahara before eventually bringing her to Morocco.
Opening on October 3, the exhibition brings together more than 200 photographs, drawings, manuscripts, objects and archival documents tracing her journeys and work.
And honestly, the setting couldn’t make more sense.
The Musée Yves Saint Laurent has always existed at the intersection of fashion and Moroccan cultural history, so an exhibition built around travel, landscapes, documentation and visual archives fits naturally into the space.
Du Puigaudeau spent years travelling through Mauritania and the Sahara during a period when women undertaking expeditions of that scale were extremely rare. Alongside her partner Marion Sénones, she documented communities, landscapes and everyday life through writing, drawings and photography.
She would later settle in Rabat, where she spent the final years of her life.
For visitors, though, this isn’t necessarily the kind of exhibition where you need to arrive knowing her entire biography. The hundreds of archival pieces create their own visual journey through another era of North African and Saharan history.
Basically, if your idea of a Marrakech afternoon involves YSL, photography, beautiful archives and pretending you’re extremely cultured for two hours, your October plans are beginning to write themselves.
