Thank you so much for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to share our work over the past few years, organising and developing cultural projects in Morocco and throughout the continent. Meriem has been with me for the past eight or nine years, so she is part of the history of that and the DNA of the foundation as well.

The Fondation was created in 2009, it is based in Casablanca. It is a non-profit institution that was initially established by my family, which I then started running a few years later.
At the beginning the foundation was created to provide structure to the collection, but then it became committed to art and to culture by developing cultural projects in Morocco.

I've always dreamed of having a space in Casablanca, we've had a small villa for a while but it wasn't in the centre of Casablanca. This is where we were organising exhibitions, and especially the Lcc Program exhibitions. We had to close it to be able to focus our efforts onto Marrakesh's museum. But now we have this space which we wanted to use to help, support artists, researchers and creators. It's a ground floor, 500 square metre space that is well equipped, and we regularly invite artists that don’t have the chance or access to the infrastructure to propose an exhibition. It’s also a window for what we do in Marrakech, we have the MACAAL residents programme involved at some points, we invite the artists into the Casablanca space. It's two different crowds, Casablanca and Marrakech, they're not far from each other, but they're far mentality-wise and in terms of direction.

Everything starts for a reason. When we launched the Foundation, and all the projects and programmes that we've developed, it was because there was a huge lack, not only of infrastructure, but also a lack of expertise and spaces, to give a voice to people and artists. For me, our main goal was to build a public. At the beginning it was hard bringing people into the museum and giving them a purpose to join us. We were determined to be very accessible, so we put all our efforts into mediation programmes and educational programmes. MACAAL is a bridge between local audiences and the cultural spheres;
we organise workshops and work with associations, schools, universities, artists themselves to create a bridge to access the arts, to bring awareness and generate engagement for the youngest crowds. It is an amazing thing to see how these programmes actually evolved because now we have a museum but we still have the same schools that we've been working with for the past eight years coming to our programmes and applying to them. I'm very happy to see how we became a point of contact for many of these youths, because they meet in our museum, in our spaces, go to the gardens together, and bring their families back. This was a huge accomplishment, especially thanks to Moroccans' hospitality and Moroccans' kindness.
That was a part of our history, and it's still going on.

The Lcc Program, which stands for La Chambre Claire, is an annual photo contest that we founded with Meriem in 2013. This programme started very naturally through my passion for photography, after I met with a few photographers and became friends with Leila Alaoui. Photography is our generation's medium and at the time, there was no infrastructure for photography so we decided to dedicate a contest for emerging African photographers. We also support other initiatives through the same platform in Morocco and internationally; we will be part of the Lagos Photo Festival and the Tangier Photography Meetings, for example. Lcc is now an important programme on the continent.

We started by inviting an international jury composed usually with an artist, a gallerist, a journalist, a curator, to bring all the intellectual minds together so we could be objective in the selection. Also, the call for applications would go through all our networks and we would receive around 300-400 applications, it's a hard game to play, we have to be very selective. One year an award wasn't given because it wasn't a good year.
We are very selective! Maya-InèsTouam was our latest winner, right before COVID, she's a rising star. She has been in great exhibitions internationally, and we continue to support her work. She creates these massive photographs of still life. The 20th century re-visited!

I think they're very similar. I'm a collector, by heart and by passion, but an expert and a collector have the same artistic eye. I would judge a piece as if I was going to buy the piece. However, I do consider some criteria, it's part of the process for a collector as well as within the jury.

The inauguration of MACAAL was a response to this lack of infrastructure. We wanted to create a space that would simulate and become a home for our collection. We're not only a museum, we're more like a living platform, a space which promotes exchange and sharing. The museum arrived very late, because we really wanted to make the museum a place that would be firstly dedicated to our collection, but also dedicated to the creativity of our region and the continent. In 2016, Marrakech was already an international hub in contemporary arts and culturally, but also a tourist hub. I like to think we've opened the doors of our home. We have a saying in French, where we say, "tell me where you live and I'll tell you who you are." We are the reflection of our architecture.
Opening our doors, operating our home to a wider audience wasn't something any Moroccan would think of, I think we were the first ones to open a not for profit space for art, for artists, to promote and to engage with the public. We have an ambitious programme that includes two to three exhibitions a year and also, of course, important exhibitions where we invite guest curators to work within the context of MACAAL.
There are actually more than 2,000 works in our collection, we have more or less 2,500 works, but I think 500 are dedicated to MACAAL, which are more museum oriented, and either historical or impactful for the context of the MACAAL. We don't necessarily collect African art, of course, it's part of our identity but we've also been collecting art from South American artists, Southern Asian artists as well, now I'm interested in focusing on emerging American artists. My dad was the first to start the collection 45-50 years ago,
it was mainly paintings, we started with the orientalists and then Moroccan modernists.

Joy is a British-Nigerian artist, I discovered Joy's work at 1-54 in London. It was probably the first time she was exhibiting in 2018 and it was probably one of her first few pieces. I loved the work because it reminds me of my family the first time I saw it, I was like,
"Oh my god, it's me, my sister, and my brother." Joy is now a rising star, she's probably one of the great discoveries I've made. She discovered a family photo album a long time ago and all her paintings are actually these intimate scenes of her family life, its stolen moments of her life. I love the fact that they're very large canvases, and the bright colours are very joyful. We currently have two in the collection, that was a purchase we acquired recently, we're very proud to have them in the collection.

This is the same for Cassi as well! Cassi Namoda is probably one of the highlights of my year. She's a painter from Mozambique, I knew her from her performances, I've been following her on Instagram, she has a very strong following. I love that she really explores the social dynamics in the countries she lives in, she explores issues such as racial identity, usually in more figurative paintings. This is probably one of the only pieces where you cannot see a face, which is why I went for that one specifically. It’s one of our latest acquisitions and it has very beautiful colour palettes, it’s very elegant.

Besides being a very close friend, he's a great person, probably one of the most talented human beings I know. He's Moroccan, born in the very deep south of Morocco.
He's a teacher, an artist, he really has this very sensitive and aesthetic sense that you can feel in his works. Looking closely at his approach really gives you a better idea of how Moroccan culture evolves. M'barek's work is also very conceptual and has lots of layers of understanding through different techniques, and he's not closed to one technique.
It's always evolving. He would use copper, he would use brass, he would use paintings, rubber. He's a true poet, his work was based actually on this Black Moroccan poet who wrote on what's happening in the south in the situation of minorities in Morocco.
It's a very intimate approach and very sensitive.