Diary of an Art-Filled Marrakech Escape

My first stop, immediately after landing, was for one of the Special Projects presented in official partnership with the 1‑54 Contemporary African Art Fair: an explosion of colour, textures and rhythm at In Between Blues at DADA Marrakech. Curated by the independent platform ABLAKASSA, the project was conceived as an immersive exploration of the colour blue not as a decorative device, but as a site of memory, identity, migration, and transformation. From sculpture and installation to textile, the show invited visitors into a layered encounter that unfolded across Blue making the whole installation feel like a living, breathing journey into narrative and perception. 

Within this constellation of voices and materials, one presence that stood out was that of Ghizlane Sahli. Sahli works between embroidery amd sculpture, developing a personal visual language rooted in material transformation. Rooted in ancestral textile practices, she collaborates with women artisans from her Marrakech studio to weave “alvéoles” modular three‑dimensional forms created from recycled materials and silk thread, into poetic, organic shapes that reference breath, cellular structure, and bodily experience. Her work, part of international collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Marrakech, always feels deeply connected to its environment and materials, embodying resilience and continuity. 

At In Between Blues, Sahli’s presence was not just another contribution; it felt like an anchoring thread — a tactile reminder that colour, body, and memory are inseparable in contemporary practice. Blue became metaphor and material, inviting viewers not only to see but to feel and recall their own internal landscapes. It was, truly, a living constellation of art, sound, and dialogue that set the tone for everything that followed in Marrakech. 

Le Comptoir des Mines was one of the most emotionally resonant stops of Gallery Night for me. A space where material, memory, and inner landscapes met with remarkable clarity and depth.

‘Sarabande’ by Yasmina Alaoui

In her new exhibition Sarabande, Yasmina Alaoui continues her long-standing exploration of multiple identities, cultural hybridisation, and the overlapping of visual languages. The title borrowed from a slow, ceremonial dance, feels perfectly chosen. There is a sense of rhythm and repetition throughout the works, but also restraint, as if each painting is holding its breath.

Alaoui’s practice has always moved between worlds: Moroccan and Western, figurative and abstract, intimate and symbolic. In Sarabande, these dualities become even more finely tuned. Bodies appear and dissolve, surfaces feel simultaneously delicate and charged, and gestures seem to hover between control and abandon.

What I found particularly compelling was how the works resist a single reading. They invite you to stay, to look again, to accept contradiction. Identity here is not fixed it is layered, unstable, and deeply human. Rather than resolving tension, Alaoui allows it to exist, giving space to ambiguity as a form of truth.

Exhibition by Khadija Jayi

Alongside Sarabande, the gallery presented works by Khadija Jayi. The exhibition feels not like a momentary presentation, but the unfolding of a mature, deeply committed artistic journey.

Jayi has continued to develop a demanding and profoundly inspired body of work, one in which fire becomes both medium and language. Importantly, fire is never used here as spectacle. It is not theatrical, nor demonstrative. Instead, it feels like an inner necessity a way of testing the limits of material in order to reveal something essential.

Through burning, marking, and transformation, Jayi brings forth forms that are emotionally charged and fragile, constantly oscillating between pain and light, tension and calm, collapse and hope. The surfaces bear traces of struggle, but also of resilience. There is a quiet intensity in these works a sense that destruction is not an end, but a passage.

Standing in front of them, I felt that fire, in Jayi’s hands, becomes a tool of revelation rather than rupture: a means of making visible what might otherwise remain unspoken.

L’Atelier 21 — Les natures invisibles by Najia Mehadji & Yamou

In this thoughtful pairing, two artists problematize the seen and unseen in nature and culture.

Najia Mehadji, born in Paris in 1950 and active on both the French and Moroccan art scenes, has spent decades fusing gesture, calligraphy, movement, and drawing into a highly symbolic practice. Her work emerges from a lifelong dialogue between Western and Eastern forms, and her creative process often evokes energy, motion, and cosmology rather than literal representation.

Alongside her, Yamou, trained initially in biology before committing to art, brings a patient attentiveness to organic form. Together in Les natures invisibles, their work speaks to forces that transcend visibility: the breath of life in plant forms, the rhythms that connect tiny gestures with cosmic dimensions. As a curator noted, “Rather than reproducing the visible, art makes perceptible the cosmic breath of the universe.”

Getting to witness these "invisible natures" firsthand during my studio visit in Tahannaout added a layer of intimacy to the work. Being in the space where that cosmic breath is captured allowed me to truly feel the quiet, biological pulse that Yamou so masterfully translates onto the canvas.

From État(s) de Passage to The Memory of Gesture at the Mandarin Oriental Marrakech, the final receptions of the week felt like a quiet crescendo rather than a finale.

At The Memory of Gesture, the focus shifted to the body as archive. Here, gesture was not decorative but essential. A trace of memory, resistance, care, and transmission. Hands, marks, movements, and repeated actions became carriers of history, particularly feminine and collective histories so often absent from official narratives. The works seemed to ask: what remains when words disappear? What does the body remember even when language fails?

Marrakech taught me that contemporary art is never just about aesthetics. It is about community and continuity, about histories that surface through material and gesture, about dialogue rooted in place yet open to the world. Each gallery visit, each studio encounter, felt like an invitation: not simply to look, but to listen.

Walking through those gallery doors, or stepping into an artist’s workspace, meant entering a story that was at once deeply personal and endlessly shared. These were not isolated works, but fragments of larger conversations — between artists and materials, between memory and the present, between individual experience and collective imagination.

In those moments, art was not offering answers. It was opening spaces. And the conversations that emerged — layered, unfinished, and alive — became part of what I carried home with me. Not souvenirs, but resonances.