Fez — Marrakech is turning into an open-air photography trail this month as “Mai de la Photo” (May of the Picture) returns for its third edition under the theme “Memory(ies),” inviting visitors to explore the city through images, archives, and personal stories.
Running from April 29 to May 31, the festival brings together cultural institutions, galleries, riads, and public spaces for a citywide program centered on photography as a tool of remembrance and transmission. The official festival page presents this year’s theme as an inclusive journey through archives and vernacular narratives across Marrakech.
The French Institute of Marrakech says the 2026 edition features 15 exhibitions around memory and is designed as an open, participatory, and inclusive event.
A city of images and memory
The theme “Memory(ies)” reflects Marrakech’s layered identity as a city shaped by movement, hospitality, trade, exile, and cultural crossings. Rather than offering postcard views of the city, the festival focuses on what images preserve, question, or sometimes fail to keep.
At the Denise Masson House, French photographer Delphine Warin presents “La chance qui danse,” a sensitive documentary project rooted in Morocco, where she has lived and worked for two decades. Her work explores presence, transmission, and the quiet traces people leave behind.
At the Al Maaden Museum of Contemporary African Art, Ismail Alaoui Fdili presents “Under Destruction,” a project documenting the demolition of working-class neighborhoods, including in Casablanca and Cambodia. The exhibition looks at how walls, streets, and fragments of buildings can carry collective memory before disappearing.
Young Moroccan voices
The festival also gives space to emerging Moroccan photographers through “Jil Lioum,” a program supported by the French Institute of Morocco. The exhibition brings together six young Moroccan artists, Mourad Fedouach, Rime Sabbar, Oussama Sbaa, Yassine Sellame, Younes Sefyaoui, and Nizar Laajali.
Presented on the esplanade of Marrakech City Hall, the project aims to make photography accessible beyond closed gallery spaces. It also allows young artists to frame their own generation through images of urban life, rural realities, sports, intimacy, and social change.
Other venues across the city are also taking part, including Le 18 Marrakech, Montresso Foundation, House of Photography, Les Étoiles de Jemaa el Fna, Ali Zaoua Foundation, and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum.
Beyond nostalgia
Several exhibitions approach memory not as nostalgia, but as a living and sometimes fragile material. Rida Tabit’s “Gold Rust,” hosted by Montresso Foundation, turns attention to traditional tanneries near Marrakech and the artisans who preserve centuries-old techniques.
Meanwhile, Hiba Dahibi’s “Home Away From Home” at Le 18 Marrakech uses photography and text to explore exile, grief, and the emotional weight of places left behind.
Together, these projects show how photography can move between the intimate and the political, between personal loss and shared heritage.
By spreading across Marrakech’s institutions and streets, “Mai de la Photo” gives the city a month to look back without standing still. In a city often photographed from the outside, the festival offers a more complex invitation: to see Marrakech through the memories it holds, the voices it gathers, and the stories still developing in its light.
