A poetics of gesture, memory and making across Madagascar and Morocco.
29 April 2026
‘Les mains des poètes’ unfolds as both encounter and inscription, where the hand becomes a site of knowledge. Moroccan artist M’barek Bouhchichi anchors this exhibition in a process of immersion and exchange, following a residency in Madagascar that privileged proximity over distance, listening over authorship. Moving through markets, workshops and informal studios, he enters into dialogue with artisans whose practices hold histories not easily archived.
The resulting works, produced collaboratively between Madagascar and Morocco, resist singular authorship. Instead, they operate as layered gestures shaped by blacksmiths, weavers, ceramists and musicians, each imprinting material with lived memory.
Central to the exhibition is a return to sorabe, the Arabico-Malagasy script that once carried spiritual, political and scientific knowledge. Here, writing is not fixed but embodied, inseparable from gesture, voice and transmission.
Bouhchichi proposes an expanded language in which making is thinking, and in which the hand, in its repetition and rhythm, becomes both archive and author. In this space, poetry is not written. It is forged, woven and held.
This exhibition is on view at Foundation H, in Antananarivo, Madagascar, until 17 October 2026.
