"Home Forever" by Aymane Ait Yahya (Invited by Mouhawalat Collective)

For the fourth Mahatta activation, Aymane Ait Yahya presents his performative installation Home Forever. Home Forever explores the stability, instability and temporality of the home. Through a series of constructed and deconstructed ephemeral forts, the performance engages in a process of dismantling temporary dwellings. This transitory cycle explores the fluid boundaries between home and the discomfort of constant injunctions to adapt to new territories. By continually reconstructing and deconstructing these ephemeral spaces, Home Forever reveals the home as a fluid, ever-changing construct. It challenges conventional notions of permanence, suggesting a form of stability that can be found in the very process of change and adaptation. In the act of creating and recreating his living spaces, Youssef Essousy offers a meditation on the transitory nature of home, identity and the impact of our experiences on our sense of place and belonging. Throughout Home Forever, Aymane Ait Yahya repeatedly builds and inhabits cushion houses before dismantling them. Using the same cushions, he then rebuilds a new house of a different shape, continuing this process, which remains intact until the second day. Home Forever creates duality and disruption, contrasting the notion of a permanent, unchanging home with its transitory, uprooted and poetic nature. 

Mahatta is a participatory installation that acts as a station for sharing and exchange. This station grows and shifts; its components multiply with each encounter. Like a plant that spreads throughout its environment, the installation is an archive in progress, recalling and listening to collective voices and shared opinions, questions, concerns, reflections, doubts, feelings, stories of attempts, perspectives, solidarity and common ground. For the Art Explora Festival, Mouhawalat Collective (Diyae Bourhim & Ahmad Karmouni), will welcome to their Mahatta installation a selection of art students recently graduated from the INBA, to invest and activate the hybrid space of Mahatta through a series of in situ interventions that vary from day to day for the duration of the Festival. A wider circle, an invitation to explore the imaginaries and narratives that shape our collective understanding of the art world. This proposition interrogates the practical realities and struggles inherent in the creative process, exploring the expectations and realities of young artists in transition between the academy and the professional world. Each graduate contributes to transforming Mahatta (the station) on a daily basis, making this space an ever-changing landscape. Mahatta becomes a station where each passenger leaves his or her mark, enriching the space with individual and collective stories. Every day, the installation reinvents itself, capturing the diverse voices of the participants.

Aymane Ait Yahya

Aymane Ait Yahya (b. 2002, Tinghir) is a Moroccan multidisciplinary artist currently based in Marrakech. A graduate of the Institut National des Beaux-Arts de Tétouan in 2024, he draws on his multiple experiences of living in different places to explore the concept of home, between stability and change. He seeks to redefine what it means to be "at home" in a world where landmarks are constantly disrupted by increasing mobility, immigration and conflict. His artistic practice includes painting, sculpture and installation. 

Mouhawalat (pl.tentative) is an artistic collective co-founded in 2020 by four young artists who graduated from the Beaux-arts in Tétouan (Morocco), and now has two members: Diyae Bourhim and Ahmad Karmouni. Through discursive, editorial and artistic projects, the collective seeks alternative paths for learning and circulation processes to encourage transmission. Its projects act to link mutual care and life experiences between art workers, through the organization of workshops, collective and collaborative exhibitions, discussions, artist interviews...