OCP · 1 Œuvre, 1 Histoire

In July 2020, Arroz Con Pollo produced two mini-documentaries with Diptyk for OCP's art patronage: one on Mohamed Melehi, one on Chaïbia. The series title, 1 Œuvre, 1 Histoire, sets its own rule: one work, one story.

July 2020 was the middle of the pandemic, with galleries and museums closed or barely open. Films were one of the few ways art could still reach people.

Nabil Nadifi and I are credited with creative direction and production. OCP provided courtesy footage and imagery. The work is a studio contribution and I keep the credit where it belongs: with Nabil, with the studio, and with Diptyk as the editorial partner.

Melehi and Chaïbia are two major figures of Moroccan art, and two very different ones. A mini-documentary has a few minutes to make a viewer care about a single work and the life behind it, without reducing either to a caption.

The rule in the title helped. Starting from one work rather than a whole career gives the film a centre, and lets the story radiate out from something the viewer can actually look at.

The films also had to work for two publics at once: people who already knew these artists, and people meeting them for the first time.

Corporate art patronage usually appears as a logo in a catalogue or a line in an annual report. A short film puts the patron's support where people actually look, in a feed, next to the artist's work.

The difficulty is that the same feed ignores anything that looks like corporate communication. The series had to read as art content first. Diptyk's editorial voice made that possible, and the studio's job was to make the films match it.

My team at Arroz Con Pollo had rebuilt Diptyk's digital strategy and communication from A to Z. Once the magazine behaved as a media brand, partners came to it: Audi with Driven by Art around 1-54 in Marrakech, and OCP with this series the same year.

For OCP, working through Diptyk brought the magazine's standing with artists and collectors. A patron's name on a film about an artist only works if the film is about the artist.