Initiated in 2019 by Rim Mejdi and Francesca Masoero, the Ateliers Collectifs | الورشات الجماعية of Dar Bellarj have been imagined as an alternative school, a space for the making of, and experimentation with ideas, knowledge and imaginaries. Inspired by contextual and vernacular forms of transmission, our methodology explores ways to bring these latter in dialogue with new languages, including those specific to the contemporary arts.
Running throughout the whole year, the collective workshops | الورشات الجماعية address the large community of Dar Bellarj, composed of kids, teenagers and (particularly) mothers living in the medina of Marrakech and are open and diverse in format and scope. 
Raising from key questions and fractures traversing and affecting the city, the workshops are imagined as temporary assemblies, as working groups and as moments of horizontal learning and exchange of tools and knowledge between the participants and the invited facilitators. In this sense the Collective Workshops are spaces that, in a cumulative fashion and durational process, allow for a collective exploration and activation of the ancestral heritage and living cultures of Marrakech as carried first and foremost by its inhabitants. Bringing their voice at the front, they aim to rethink the possibilities of both maintaining and retranslating the collective memory and the principles that this heritage underpins in our current society in order to re-ground new spaces of the common and modes of living rooted in solidarity and care. The workshops are therefore playgrounds where languages of expression intersect and new shared meaning is created, moving away from rigid and often violent categorisations (vernacular, scientific, artistic, artisanal, traditional, contemporary…). They are rehearsal rooms where seeds are planted and slowly allowed to grow. They are prefigurative acts for healing fragmentations and embody generosity in community, cultural continuity in liberatory transformation.
Since its inception, the collective workshops | الورشات الجماعية have been developed in dialogue with Dar Bellarj’s younger sister, LE 18, and more particularly in close entanglement with the action-research developed by the collective platform QANAT. The workshops have also organically merged, crossed paths, with some of the artistic projects developed as part of Ch[a]rita / السِّيس.