Rabat – As part of the 3rd edition of Mai de la Photo Marrakech, IZZA presents “The Space Between Us,” a new exhibition bringing together works by Fatimazohra Serri, Ismail Zaidy, and Safaa Kotbi.
Curated by Aicha Benazzouz and Natasha Cox, the exhibition explores memory as a living, shifting, and collective material, something carried between people, bodies, gestures, and generations.
Memory unfolds and rebuilds in mysterious ways each time we revisit it, shaped as much by absence as by presence. Yet perhaps most importantly, memory is rarely held by one person alone.
“The Space Between Us,” takes its starting point from the idea that memory exists between us, sustained collectively through objects, rituals, spaces, and inherited gestures.
As writer Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, memory is held in “the basket, the medicine bundle, the net, the home,” in everyday containers rather than monuments.
In Morocco, one of the oldest of those containers is cloth. Textile production dates back thousands of years, when Amazigh women first wove blankets, shawls, and tent walls carrying both practical and sacred meaning. Weaving was never simply craft; it was a way of holding things together.
That history runs throughout “The Space Between Us,” where fabric moves across all three artistic practices and extends beyond the photographic image into the architecture of IZZA itself.
Working from Studio Sa3ada, his rooftop studio in Casablanca, Ismail Zaidy creates works in close collaboration with his family.
In photographs such as “Blossom,” “The Family Garden,” and “Petals on Water”, fabric, flowers, and domestic gestures merge into poetic compositions where memory becomes something alive and blooming.
At IZZA, fabric enters the exhibition space itself, inviting visitors to physically move through layers of textile before encountering the images beyond.
The photographs of Fatimazohra Serri explore visibility, intimacy, and the representation of Moroccan women.
A recurring figure, often draped in black cloth, moves through her images as both an individual and a collective presence.
In her work, fabric becomes a site of tension, between protection and restriction, concealment and resistance. Series including Echoes of the Desert and The Forbidden Apple trace emotional landscapes shaped by solitude, guilt, anger, forgiveness, and survival.
Working across photography, drawing, engraving, and installation, Safaa Kotbi revisits the Tbourida, the Moroccan equestrian tradition rooted in folklore and military history.
Through staged imagery, family archives, and suspended objects, Kotbi reflects on the transformation of collective rituals and the gradual reduction of traditions into spectacle. Her works examine what remains when gestures, meanings, and memories begin to disappear.
“This project started from something very close to me, from my own family history and from memories connected to Tbourida,” she told MWN Lifestyle magazine.
“After that, the research became larger and moved toward Tbourida as a Moroccan heritage and as a practice carrying a deeper history that is not always visible today.”
Across all three practices, “The Space Between Us” reflects on what continues to exist between people: the materials, gestures, objects, and memories that inhabit spaces long after bodies have gone.
