Fez — The 29th Fez Festival of World Sacred Music will open tomorrow at 9 p.m. with “Anima Ex Materia – Du ciel à la terre” (From Heaven to Earth), a new poetic and choreographic creation staged at Bab Makina.
The opening night anchors this year’s theme, “Fès et les Mâalemines, Gardiens du Geste et du Patrimoine” (Fez and the Master Artisans, Guardians of Gesture and Heritage). It places the artisan’s hand at the center of the festival, treating craft as both a spiritual act and a form of memory.
“Anima Ex Materia” is built as a journey between heaven and earth. The performance draws on the four classical elements of the universe — water, earth, air, and fire — and transforms the workshop into a sacred stage. The furnace, forge, chisel, potter’s wheel, and bellows become signs of creation, showing how raw matter becomes beauty through skill, patience, and inherited knowledge.
The artisan’s hand as sacred language
The show will unfold through a lantern-lit atmosphere inspired by the work of Fez’s brass artisans. It will honor tanners, dyers, weavers, shoemakers, zellige makers, woodworkers, and metalworkers, while linking local craft traditions to wider histories of making across the world.
The creation also moves through symbolic artistic routes. It follows the thread of medina weavers back to the ancient discovery of silk in the palace of Empress Si Ling-chi. It places Fez zellige in dialogue with Escher’s calligraphic forms and the mosaics of Volubilis. It also brings the force of the forge to Bab Makina, paying tribute to blacksmiths from Morocco’s Grand South to Roma traditions.
Artists from Morocco, India, Central Asia, China, Cambodia, and the Balkans will take part in the opening night, giving the tribute a global dimension while keeping Fez’s artisanal civilization at its core.
The festival will run for four days and bring together more than 160 artists from four continents.
