Hassan Darsi Impact Awards recipient

Hassan Darsi is a visual artist from Casablanca whose work promotes critical thinking about public spaces and citizenship in a city that is rife with economic inequality, and in a country with limited freedoms of expression. Darsi developed a practice centered on gilding and public spaces. 

In 1995 he co-founded La Source du Lion, a cultural laboratory that brings together thinkers, artists, journalists, students, and the general public to discuss the role of art in society. Both individually and with the La Source du Lion, Darsi has produced art projects that are significant in the history of contemporary art in Morocco. 

One of the most notable of these is the L’Hermitage park project (2002-2008) which focused on the abandoned, colonial-era L’Hermitage park in Casablanca. Together with the community who live in and around the park he drafted a plan to create community spaces for storytelling, art and repose. In a series of artist interventions - called Passerelles artistiques - different parts of the park became transformed into true spaces of wonder. 

Darsi has redefined art in the Moroccan context by engaging the larger Moroccan public through his exhibitions.