Casablanca – Moroccan artist Safaa Erruas will present her latest solo exhibition, “Habiter l’interstice” (Inhabiting the In-Between) at L’Atelier 21 in Casablanca from September 29 to November 7.
The exhibition, which opens with a vernissage on September 29 at 7 p.m., continues Erruas’ long-standing interest in ideas of crossing, transition, and borders. This time, she turns her attention to the spaces in between, both as physical territories and as places of inner experience.
‘Inhabiting the In-Between’
At the heart of the exhibition is the idea of the strait, a narrow passage of water that connects two bodies of land while keeping them apart.
Erruas approaches these passages as spaces that can be welcoming or difficult to inhabit, using them as a starting point to think about the boundaries people encounter both around them and within themselves.
Her interpretation comes through a restrained but tactile selection of materials. She transforms paper, cotton, pins, needles, fiberglass, and metal wire into lines, grids, ribbons, and geometric structures. Together, they create works that play with what is present and what is missing.
Empty space becomes part of the composition rather than something left behind. Light meets shadow, dense arrangements give way to openings, and delicate materials take on a sense of tension.
The works can resemble fragments of maps, although they seem less interested in showing a destination than in capturing the uncertain territory between two points.
‘Cartographies of the intimate’
That idea also runs through art critic Olivier Rachet’s reading of the exhibition.
In the catalogue text, he describes Erruas’ works as “cartographies of the intimate,” connecting her imagined passages between land and sea to the less visible lines that shape our inner worlds.
Born in Tetouan in 1976, the Moroccan artist graduated from the city’s National Institute of Fine Arts in 1998.
Erruas has spent much of her practice working with paper and installation, often reducing her palette to white while giving unexpected weight to delicate materials.
Pins, needles, razor blades, and cotton gauze have all found their way into her work, where they are reworked into visual elements rather than simply used for their original purpose.
Her pieces are part of several public and private collections, including Fondation Blachère and Les Abattoirs in France, Fondation H in Madagascar, CCA Lagos in Nigeria, and Morocco’s Musée d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden, Bank Al-Maghrib, and Fondation ONA.
With Habiter l’interstice, Erruas brings that ongoing exploration of fragility, distance, and connection into a new space, asking viewers to linger somewhere that is neither quite here nor there.
