Fondation Dar Belarj Située au cœur de la Médina de Marrakech
Fondation Dar Belarj Située au cœur de la Médina de Marrakech
Artistic interventions, screenings and conversations in Marrakech
Ch[a]rita 2018 was the first edition of a multidisciplinary artistic program exploring the relationships between public space, collective memory, urban heritage, and contemporary artistic practices in Marrakech. Through performances, screenings, discussions, installations, and participatory projects, the program invited audiences to discover the city as a space for encounter, imagination, and shared narratives.
Voici la version anglaise, avec le même ton institutionnel et culturel que les autres éditions de Ch[a]rita :Ch[a]rita 2018 marked the beginning of a long-term artistic and cultural initiative dedicated to exploring public space as a place of collective memory, social interaction, and cultural production. Conceived by the Madrassa Collective in collaboration with local and international partners, this first edition unfolded across several locations in Marrakech, including public squares, historic neighborhoods, cultural spaces, and community gathering places.This first edition brought together artists, filmmakers, researchers, performers, architects, and cultural practitioners whose practices addressed questions related to urban transformations, heritage, migration, memory, gender, and belonging. Through a rich program of screenings, performances, public discussions, workshops, installations, and site-specific artistic interventions, participants were invited to rethink how public spaces are lived, shared, represented, and contested.At the heart of this edition was the relationship between the city and its inhabitants. The different projects explored how collective memories inhabit streets, markets, squares, and neighborhoods, while questioning the tensions generated by tourism, urban development, heritage policies, and social transformations.By engaging with places such as Jemaa el-Fna, the Medina, Souk El Ghzel, and other spaces of everyday life, Ch[a]rita transformed familiar places into temporary platforms for dialogue, artistic production, and collective experimentation.The program brought together film screenings, performances, public discussions, sound projects, installations, workshops, and participatory actions, inviting audiences to actively engage with their urban environment. Artists were encouraged to explore how cities are shaped through visible and invisible stories, and how public spaces become repositories of collective experiences.Through research focusing on architecture, oral narratives, popular cultures, tourism, and everyday practices, the projects highlighted the complex relationship between contemporary urban realities and inherited cultural narratives. Particular attention was given to Marrakech, whose public spaces and historic sites became spaces for research and artistic experimentation.These interventions invited audiences to question dominant representations of the city while rediscovering stories, practices, and forms of knowledge often rendered invisible within its urban fabric.By fostering encounters between local communities, artists, researchers, and audiences, Ch[a]rita 2018 proposed new ways of engaging with the city. The first edition thus laid the foundations for subsequent editions, affirming the importance of public space as a shared cultural resource and highlighting the role of artistic practices in creating spaces for reflection, participation, and collective imagination.
Ancestral footsteps is a performative ephemeral installation in souk Laghzel, one of the historical slave markets of the city of Marrakech, now converted in a women-led second-hand clothing one.
As a journey traversing times, places, voices and voids, the piece explores, through visual and sonic overlaps and crossovers, the silenced history of slavery in Morocco and the contemporary racialised conditions of sub-Saharan African women migrants in Morocco.
The spatial and visual configuration of the square, its cumulation of second-hand clothes, traces of transient statuses of ownership, of invisible or absent bodies, does not only evoke the passage and trading of enslaved subjects through time, but denounces also the competing appropriation over, or inaccessibility to archives, memories, histories and images.
Cabaret is an ongoing research project by Firas Hamdan aimed at questioning spatial relations and divisions within the changing dynamics
of the urban fabric in major Arab cities, where art production in spaces such as cabarets or theaters negotiates inclusivity and connection to its
surroundings. Challenging cultural stigmas, the research utilises archival material collected from literature, theater, films, commercials and TV shows, to articulate the social dimensions of public space, spotlight and representation in the media. Cabaret is a series of shows in the form of live DJ performances, film screenings and public talks started last year as part of Bazar, a programme curated by Madrassa Collective.
While part of the discursive programme was presented at LE 18, Cabaret was activated as Cabaret 7wai in the now demolished and iconic Gueliz’s Cabaret 7Heaven. A research based remix of tunes that made people dance since the middle of the past century for decades, Cabaret 7awi recalls collective memories to the dance floor and orchestrates Tarab ambiance preferably associated with alcohol, cigarette smoke and red lights.
Moving from collected narrations and field recordings, Herder proposes a sonic guided tour in the medina reactivating collective and intimate spaces of remembrance of the medina that used to be.
The tour is nourished by the description by ancient inhabitants of their neighbourhood, houses and cafés, by soundscapes capturing habitats of social practices that have been displaced from the medina to other districts of Marrakech. Navigating between displacement and replacement, layers of time intermingle.
Present and past, reality and fiction superimpose, asking what happens if the declaration of places as a world heritage expulses the social spaces that formerly coexisted with the architectonic space.
Adopting the aesthetic features of a traditional halqah, Arnakech is a pop-up photographic studio installing itself in the earth of Jemaa el Fna to offer tourists the possibility to portrait themselves in the
most symbolic, and exoticised, square of the city.
Developed with the complicity of the association Ana Kanbghi Jemaa el Fna, Arnakech aims at inverting the power relations linked to photographic and portraying practices, while also playfully questioning the presence of strange[r] bodies, and the dominant Western canons recognized and demanded for the so-called African studio photography.
An archive of the project can be found here: https://www.instagram.com/arnakech_project/ Laila Hida / Based in Marrakech, Hida is a photographer exploring the tensions between the narrative potential of the camera and the selective nature of memory.
Traditionally, in the medina, when people need help, they usually knock on each other’s doors and ask for support. This social practice of proximate solidarity is nonetheless gradually disappearing, as the social tissue in the medina has deteriorated and many inhabitants have moved out of it.
Through a performative workshop transforming into a public installation, Ouhnni proposes to appropriate and reenact this process of sharing with the inhabitants of LE 18’s neighborhood, derb el ferrane. Collecting photos and daily life basic goods such as tea, coffee, cereals, sugar and salt, the participative installation represents the living ingredients nourishing the medina.
Vulnerabilité is a collaborative, semi-comic lecture-performance, and a quasi-biographical, critical reflection on feminism, socialization in patriarchal social structures and personal emancipatory processes.
The artist unveils women’s body as a battlefield, as both a (seductive) weapon and a fragile space, playing with contradictory terms, from ironic and burlesque elements to tragic ones. Born as a solo piece in response to the current European anti-racist and feminized asylum discourse, this new episode is developed with the mediation of Maha Elmadi and with the Mamans of Dar Bellarj in Marrakech, drawing from their memories and imaginaries.
Vulnerabilité therefore enacts multilayered processes of subjective appropriation and translation from woman to woman, from place to place, from institute to institute.
Ülkü Süngün / Based in Stuttgart, Süngün’s conceptual multidisciplinary work investigates identity, gender relations, language, migration and the politics of remembrance.