Marrakech – There is a particular stillness that precedes revelation, the kind that gathers in a room before the first viewer crosses its threshold. On Saturday evening, as the medina’s late-May light collapsed into amber, IZZA Marrakech opened “The Space Between Us” – a trilateral exhibition that positions fabric, ritual, and domestic architecture as vessels for memory’s most elusive residues.
Staged under the umbrella of Mai de la Photo’s third edition, the show brings together Fatimazohra Serri, Ismail Zaidy, and Safaa Kotbi – three practitioners whose trajectories converge not on a shared aesthetic but on a shared conviction: that memory is never sovereign, never singular, never cleanly archived. It circulates. It adheres to surfaces. It inhabits the distance between bodies rather than the bodies themselves.
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Curated by Aicha Benazzouz and Natasha Cox, the exhibition draws its conceptual spine from Moroccan textile traditions, where cloth has operated for millennia as shelter, social grammar, and sacred carrier. Amazigh women wove not merely blankets and tent walls but cosmologies – practical objects freighted with ritualistic meaning. That genealogy threads through all three practices on display, though each artist metabolizes it differently, pulling the textile metaphor toward distinct registers of intimacy, spectacle, and loss.
What binds the three is a shared attentiveness to what performance theorists call “repertoire” – the embodied, non-archival knowledge transmitted through gesture, ceremony, and material practice rather than through written record. The Space Between Us treats photography itself as a repertorial act: each image a trace of something performed, inhabited, and then released.
Ismail Zaidy turns the rooftop into a garden where joy becomes liturgy
Zaidy works from Studio Sa3ada, a converted rooftop in Marrakech that doubles as a domestic sanctum and creative incubator. His collaboration with family members is not incidental but constitutive; the work cannot exist outside these kinship circuits. In series such as “Blossom,” “The Family Garden,” and “Petals on Water,” billowing cloth and organic matter – flowers, water, light — coalesce into tableaux of almost unbearable tenderness. The compositions feel perpetually nascent, trembling at the threshold of full bloom without ever tipping into excess.
There is a haptic quality to these images – they solicit touch before cognition, sensation before interpretation. Zaidy’s palette operates in what art historian Giuliana Bruno might term a “surface tension,” where the boundary between viewer and viewed grows porous, almost osmotic.
At IZZA, Zaidy escalates the proposition beyond the photographic plane. Fabric enters the gallery architecture itself, compelling visitors to physically navigate the textile before encountering the image. The viewer’s body becomes implicated – brushing, displacing, momentarily held within the material’s drape. “It allows me to hide and reveal at the same time,” Zaidy told Morocco World News (MWN). “It protects the body, but it also gives it another shape – like a mask, a shelter, a movement, or even a memory.” The result is not spectatorship but transit: an ambulatory encounter where looking and touching become indistinguishable.
Fatimazohra Serri constructs cinematic sequences where survival wears white and black
Serri’s practice operates within severe spatial constraints – domestic interiors and rooftops, the only locations available to her in her hometown – and transmutes limitation into formal authority. A recurring female figure, draped alternately in black and white, migrates across her frames as both individual and archetype. “She represents the Arab – more specifically Moroccan – woman,” Serri noted. “Sometimes she is me, sometimes my sister or a friend; in each image she is someone, and at the same time, everyone.”
In “Echoes of the Desert,” lengths of black fabric unspool across arid topographies, occupying the frame with a gravitational insistence that rivals the landscape itself. The cloth is never decorative; it negotiates visibility on fiercely contested terms. Serri’s draped figure enacts what postcolonial scholars have termed a “politics of opacity” – the sovereign right to be seen without being fully legible, to occupy the visual field while refusing its extractive logics.
“The Forbidden Apple” pivots into denser psychological territory – six meticulously staged vignettes tracing an emotional arc from guilt through solitude, anger, betrayal, and ultimately forgiveness. Each composition is loaded with deliberate iconographic weight; the apple recurs as an emblem of choice and its irreversible consequences.
“Working on this project allowed me to process those emotions rather than carry them silently,” Serri recounted to MWN. The series reads less as autobiography than as phenomenology – an exacting cartography of states endured and, eventually, survived. Fabric shifts its semiotic register between the two bodies of work: in “Echoes,” black cloth is expansive, territorial, almost defiant; in “Forbidden Apple,” white garments turn inward, confessional, liturgical. The material never merely adorns – it testifies.
Safaa Kotbi suspends the Tbourida between living ritual and hollow spectacle
Kotbi’s contribution may be the exhibition’s most structurally ambitious. Working across photography, drawing, engraving, and installation, she interrogates the Tbourida – Morocco’s choreographed equestrian tradition rooted in collective defense and ancestral pride – as a site where cultural meaning has been progressively evacuated by touristic consumption.
“It’s not just the gesture that’s gone, but the meaning behind it,” Kotbi remarked to MWN. “This change is part of a larger historical narrative, especially during the colonial era, when many local traditions were redefined and sometimes simplified into mere images of tradition.”
The impulse, Kotbi explained, grew from proximity rather than scholarly distance. “I grew up close to this world, and with time I started feeling that many things around Tbourida were becoming louder than the practice itself,” she told MWN. “I just wanted to go back to something more quiet and sincere – the gestures, the emotions, the collective spirit behind it all.”
Her photographic series “Folcolonisation” – a portmanteau that fuses folklore with colonization into a single indictment – reconstructs the Tbourida’s temporal rhythms – the anticipatory silence, the suspended breath, the rupture of gunpowder – through staged imagery interlaced with family archive.
The title alone performs a critical intervention, naming the mechanism by which colonial epistemologies repackaged indigenous practice into consumable heritage. Kotbi’s visual grammar mirrors this tension: balloons intrude upon ceremonial dress, scenes arrive pre-composed, already spectacularized before the shutter falls.
Alongside, Material/Immaterial presents costume fragments and ceremonial objects suspended in space, stripped of the bodies that once animated them. The installation reads as an archaeological vitrine for a practice still technically alive but increasingly hollowed of its originary force. “I was interested in how something that once had a real function can slowly become an image people admire for a moment and then move away from,” Kotbi reflected.
What persists, she suggests, is not the form but its rehearsed, repeated, performed echo without the connective tissue of communal meaning. “More than giving answers, I hope the work creates questions and encourages people to look again at something they may feel familiar with, but perhaps never really stopped to think about,” Kotbi added.
The exhibition coincides with the launch of IZZA Editions, a limited-edition print initiative positioning emerging Moroccan photographers within institutional-grade production and collector-accessible frameworks.
The program was developed in partnership with Fellowship. It extends IZZA’s curatorial ambitions beyond the gallery wall and into the circuitry of contemporary art markets – a strategic intervention in the infrastructure that determines which voices travel and which remain local.
Alongside the opening, IZZA hosted a public panel discussion with Marco Guerra and Yvon Langlais, convening the participating artists for an open exchange on publishing, artistic methodologies, and the evolving cartography of contemporary Moroccan photography.
Siberian-born, Marrakech-based electronic composer Evgeniy Pisarchenko also performed live under the name Anymodal, treating sound as a vehicle for memory through field recordings, acoustic fragments, and subtle rhythmic gestures alongside the exhibition’s visual works.
The Space Between Us remains on view through June 2026 at IZZA Marrakech.
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