Safi – The gallery of the “Achjar Al Alia” Cultural Complex in Beni Mellal has turned its walls over to its youngest artists. The exhibition “Touches artistiques par les doigts de l’avenir” (Artistic Touches by the Fingers of the Future) opened there on June 30 and runs through July 10.
The show gathers drawings and paintings by children and teenagers, the close of a long season of workshops. Palette School Center for Academic and Artistic Support ran it with the “Manbaa Association,” and it is open to the public through the run.
For one of the organisers, Noureddine Lhimer, that wall is the reward for a year’s work. The visual artist heads the “Manbaa Association” and runs the center behind the show.
For him, the whole idea rests on a single contrast. “When a child takes a brush and some colors and expresses what he feels, that is better than reaching for a phone or being pulled toward something negative in his/her free time,” he told MWN Lifestyle magazine.
The fingers of the future
The theme gives the show its warmth. By naming the young participants the fingers of the future, the organizers cast the region’s children as its next makers, and give them a public wall to prove it.
The organizers built the show around access. They wanted to widen who takes part in culture in Beni Mellal, and to lift new talent from a region that rarely shares the national spotlight.
It also crowns a full season of youth programming, the culmination of months of mentoring workshops that reached young people beyond the usual institutional spaces, the ones schools and established centers tend to miss.
Art with a purpose
For Lhimer, the workshops aim at more than technique.
“Our main message is to create an atmosphere where children and young people can build their artistic skills and get into the visual arts, because it is a wide, open field where they can create,” he said. “It makes people love these arts, and it keeps children away from drugs. What we do is artistic, but it also raises awareness.”
It is a patient build. A child spends the season with a brush, and what began as practice ends up in a public show.
The goal behind it is larger. “Our ambition was to root an aesthetic and artistic culture in children and the rising generation,” he said.
A bridge to the community
That reach extends to artists with disabilities. Among those exhibiting is Hibatoullah Salim, a 22-year-old deaf artist, who sees the show as a platform for expression and a bridge to the wider community.
Her presence is the point. Art is a lever for inclusion, a way to bring young people with specific needs into a shared cultural space instead of the edge of one.
That promise sits inside the title. These are hands still learning their craft, handed a wall and the room to show what they can already do.
Years in the making
None of this is new. “Since the association was founded in 2015, we’ve been doing this throughout the year,” Lhimer said. The children paint across the year, and the exhibition draws together everything they have made.
“Children and young people are always at the heart of our activities,” he added, whether the group is mounting a workshop, an exhibition or a festival.
The work rests on a web of backers. The association draws on elected councils, institutions under the Ministry of Culture and private partners, and stages the children’s work at cultural venues across Beni Mellal.
“Whenever there is a cultural hall or an art exhibition, our partners open it to us, and we bring the children together to show their work,” Lhimer said.
A shared space
The partnership runs deeper than a single show. Palette School, which co-hosted the exhibition, works alongside the association all year, its members helping to mentor the children.
The two open their doors to each other, so a child enrolled with one turns up at the other’s events. Any child with a gift for the visual arts can take part, Lhimer added, including those from outside either center.
Those shows do more than hang paintings for parents to admire. “The children get to know one another, even the ones from outside the association, and they trade their experiences,” Lhimer said. “It creates a space where they can raise the level of their creativity and their technique.”
Beyond Beni Mellal
The association has carried that ambition beyond the city, too. It has staged the Ain Asserdoun International Festival of Visual Arts, drawing artists from Palestine, Tunisia, Iraq, Ivory Coast and Russia to Beni Mellal under the banner of art as a dialogue between cultures. Even then, the youngest are not overlooked, with painting workshops set alongside the main exhibitions.
The response is what sustains him, he said. It comes from every quarter: the children who take part, their parents, and the wider public who come to see the shows. “That is what pushes us to keep working on this side, the one that has to do with children and young people,” he said.
The aim, he said, stays simple. “All of this is just to create a space for these children, where they can practice, sharpen their talents and refine their artistic ideas,” Lhimer said.
Beni Mellal sits inland at the foot of the Middle Atlas, capital of its own region and far from the coastal cities that dominate Morocco’s art scene. A show like this keeps some of that attention at home, and for 10 days it belongs to the city’s youngest artists.
