LevioLegoLose

The history of the ambitious Moroccan land-art works featured in this issue’s fashion portfolio “Fantastic Voyage.”

THE MOROCCAN desert’s wide-open spaces and sheltering
skies have long attracted dreamers and eccentrics. So
it was with Hannsjörg Voth, a German artist known for
grandly scaled sculptural works infused with existential
and cosmic themes. Starting in the early 1980s, the Munich-based
Voth spent 20 years creating his magnum opus, a trio of monumental
edifices on the scorched Marha Plain in southeastern Morocco.
Drawing on a mix of mathematics, mythology, astronomy and ancient
architecture, the structures include Himmelstreppe, a 52-foothigh
triangular “stairway to heaven” that houses Voth’s sculpture
of Icarus’s wings; the nautilus-shaped Goldene Spirale, based on
the Fibonacci sequence, that sits over a well where the artist once
installed a boat of pure gold; and Stadt des Orion, a citylike complex
of observation towers patterned after its namesake constellation.

A rugged 90-minute drive from the oasis
town of Erfoud, Voth’s works are defined by
their remoteness. “When you’re out there you
ask yourself, Why the hell, in the emptiness of
a desert, do you have three very articulated,
calculated architectural forms?” says Hans
Brockmann, the German film producer (best
known for The Usual Suspects) who now oversees
the sites as founder of the Voth Maroc Aïn
Nejma foundation. “It’s very strange.”

While the spiral is made of stone, the
staircase and the Orion city were built using
traditional rammed-earth construction,
and initially Voth—now 78 and in declining
health—was going to let the works disintegrate
into the desert. “As death nears, apparently, we
have a desire that something of us should stay,”
says Brockmann, who also lives in Munich
and first met the artist (“a pretty wild, difficult man”) in the ’90s
through a mutual friend. Several years ago, after Brockmann
started a Moroccan charity that’s building a school in an area near
Voth’s projects, the artist reached out to him. “He said, ‘You’re
down there. Take this—you have all the rights to it, and just make
sure it’ll be taken care of,’” Brockmann explains. But rights to the
sites themselves were sketchy at best. “It was nowhere land,” says
Brockmann, “and it took me three and a half years to convince the
government to make all of this legal.”

Thanks to the internet and social media, the works have become
an increasingly popular destination. And while Voth remains something
of a fringe figure in the international art world, his profile
could rise with an exhibition slated for 2020 at Munich’s Pinakothek
der Moderne museum. There are plans for the show to offer a virtualreality
experience of ascending Voth’s Himmelstreppe and entering
the chamber with the Icarus wings. “When you’re up there, on top
of the staircase, you have this incredible view around you,” says
Brockmann. “You are really tempted to fly away.” —Stephen Wallis

Color Blind, A GROWING NUMBER OF ACCLAIMED FILMMAKERS ARE TELLING THEIR STORIES IN BLACK-AND-WHITE - LACK-AND-WHITE fi lms are having a moment. The painterly monochrome of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which received three Golden Globe nominations, and the romantic gray hues of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War have put cinephiles in a heady swoon. Both movies are their directors’ most deeply personal yet. Cuarón has said that 90  percent of Roma, which was shot in his native Mexico with mostly nonprofessional actors, comprises scenes from his memory. Pawlikowski’s movie, which ducks back and forth behind the Iron Curtain, is based on memories of his parents’ tumultuous love aff air.

For years the Polish director has led a peripatetic
existence but never without his fi ve black-and-white
family photo albums. “These photographs have impregnated
my imagination,” Pawlikowski says. Their boxy
format helped inspire the look of Cold War. “I wanted
my fi lm to be as punchy, vivid and as contrasted as
possible,” Pawlikowski says. “I felt that black-and-white
was the most suitable approach to achieve that.”

Cuarón and Pawlikowski aren’t the only fi lmmakers
turning to black-and-white. Leto, by the Russian
director Kirill Serebrennikov, was one of the most
impressive projects at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The fi lm, which has been picked up for distribution in
the U.S., is another personal vision: In this case, the
movie covers the nascent Russian rock music scene of
the early ’80s. Other upcoming black-and-white movies
include The Lighthouse—American director Robert
Eggers’s eagerly awaited follow-up to The Witch—as
well as Czech director Václav Marhoul’s The Painted
Bird, a decade-in-the-making fi lm adaptation of Jerzy
Kosinski’s controversial Holocaust novel of the same
name. “I said to myself that this fi lm must be black-andwhite,”
Marhoul says, “because, if not, the color will
damage the message and mood, which I wanted to be as
truthful and sensitive as possible.” —Tobias Grey