NOSTALGIE DU PRÉSENT
Exhibition Visit. Marrakech, February 2025
IMG credit: Ayoub Alahyane
An exhibition within the frame of 1-54, the international contemporary art fair dedicated
to African art and its diaspora.
Curated by Farah Maakel
Powered by El Mehdi Largo
Artists: Ines Abergel, Mehdi Ait El Mallali, Ismail Alaoui Fdili, Maissane Alibrahimi, Mariam Benbakkar, Elisa Budin & Nassim Boudraa, El Mehdi Largo, Melanie Ebtissem Defoin, Akim El Ouardi, Jessica El Mal, Zineb Linda Kaine, Amelia Malfait Lakhtara, Sara Noun, Yannis Ratbi, Aliocha Tazi, Shama Visini
Performances by Othman Elkheloufi and Fatim-Zahra Alami
Scenography by Ismail Alaoui Fdili, Sara Ayoub, Othman EL Kheloufi, Hiba Hillali et El Mehdi Largo, assistés d’Abderrahman Taha
Visual identity by Andyman Studio - Imane Abbadi et Andrea Sallé
Nostalgie du Présent
Rèsidence El Hamra, Marrakech, Marroco
Othman ElkheloufiI, MG credit: Ayoub Alahyane
Time, when confronted with memory, learns of its own powerlessness.
Joseph Brodsky
A riddle:
What feeling has the taste of bittersweet oranges and the scent of a grandmother’s hand lotion?
What feeling is light yet pulls our shoulders down like an (overly) weighty blanket?
Nostalgia.
How do we preserve what we call tradition without turning it into a dusty museum artifact?
How do we move forward without erasing the past—without romanticizing it, either?
Is it true that to build something new, we must abandon the old?
Can past and present coexist in true symbiosis, not just tolerating but feeding into one another,
alive and evolving?
NOSTALGIE DU PRÉSENT IS AN “ARCHIVE OF GAZES”
Nostalgie du Présent is an “archive of gazes” and a narrative in motion, curated by Farah Maakel. She orchestrates a poetry of Nostalgia, seamlesiily integrating symbols into the scenography, and intervening with the space in the most natural manner.
Drawing from cultural heritage symbols and objects, sixteen artists of the Moroccan diaspora evoke and document the feelings of nostalgia and belonging. They play, they analyze, they pay tribute. They write new chapters of the present—unapologetic, raw. Sixteen voices, each telling their story fully, in its own, unique honesty.
The exhibition unfolds across two floors of the first apartment hotel in Marrakech, opened in 1968. In its rooms, behind doors that have witnessed countless stories, in the maze of corridors, we follow the rhythm of the exhibition as if tracing the threads of a narrative—dense, layered with secrets, memories, questions. The building’s eyes, windows, are wide open to the inner courtyard, where an empty swimming pool has become part of the narrative, filling with the transcendental music of Othman Elkheloufi and people following its sounds in an ocean-wave-like dance.
A little turn, left from the staircase, the breath of the clear blue — The Water We Seek, an installation by Jessica El Mal. Mesmerizing and rhythmic, a dance of transparent curtains, recalling the joy and relief of heavy rains on the parched arteries of a city.
With a similar poetic approach, Mehdi Ait El Mallali’s In the Realm of Sense fractures the line between what the eye perceives and what we simply know without seeing. The materiality of memory, the way it flickers between presence and disappearance hides in the shadows of his work.
A layered cake of senses and meanings, a little game with serious stakes. The tension between new and old unravels in Sara Noun’s Un-happy Ending. With quiet irony, she questions the very idea of an ending. Where does a story end? Where does it begin? Must it always be that linear?
Yanis Ratbi’s Reliques des Lamentations is a map of personal heritage, complete and hybrid: “It all stems from two expressions my maternal grandmother used: "3iniya" (apple of my eye) and "hadi darkoum" (this is your home), embodying a connection both physiological and material to her and her land. I translate this bond through the layering and collage of photographs, taking the form of altarpieces. On wooden tablets, I inscribe the archaeology of my future, like Rosetta Stones to be deciphered in the light of my ancestors’ memory.”
Othman ElkheloufiI, MG credit: Ayoub Alahyane
The space fills with viewers. The hotel carries on. The maître d'hôtel seems to be unfazed by cats playing around his desk with a heavy hotel phone, some of the hotel guests are following the football game while poring hot tea into glasses. This night is another moment—sparkling, beautiful, and undoubtedly precious—in its long, unbroken history, which will continue long after the exhibition closes its doors.
FIN