Sffara, Ayman El Gadi (Invited by Mouhawalat Collective)

"Sffara" is a performance art piece by Ayman El Gadi, inspired by a traditional game he used to play with children in his neighborhood. By making a whistle from apricot pits, the artist explores the uses of this fruit, its history, and the collective history surrounding its apprehension in Moroccan craftsmanship and culture. 

Ayman's whistle echoes children's games, folk songs and ancestral rituals. He engages in a silent dialogue with matter, gradually transforming this fragment of nature into an instrument, a language that traces collective memory, its resistance, its poetics and its resonance. This tiny object is often associated with communication, protection, tidying up or warning. In this performance, whistling becomes an act of resistance and solidarity.

With this performance, Ayman El Gadi invites us to share, to eat apricots together, and reminds us of the act of playing. The performance invites the audience to become involved in the creation of a whistled harmony, a unison. 

The audience will take away the core; a fragment of the performance.

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 proposal 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 a landscape in constant evolution. Mahatta thus 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.

Ayman El Gadi

Ayman El Gadi (b. 2001), Salé. Graduate of the Institut National des Beaux-Arts de Tétouan (2024). His practice focuses on the study of traditional and digital games. Ayman is interested in the interactions and dialogues between cultural heritage and technological innovation. Through installation, sculpture and interactive pieces, his work analyzes, documents and extracts narrative lines from children's games, illustrating their evolution and impact on society.