The term kholwa (خلوة) in Moroccan Arabic refers to a private room, a place of retreat, or the act of isolating oneself. In the context of the Sakhra project, kholwa refers to a cavernous space carved into the cliff by erosion. For Sakhra 2025, six artists have been invited to create short sound pieces in response to the space and its acoustics.
Far from an ascetic posture, the artists take us on a sonic journey through their contributions: in the Moroccan countryside (Touda Bouanani and Youssef Titou), in the oasis of Tighmert (Kram Benchrif), in the Saharan desert (Oli Bonzanigo), and in the imagination of future newborns (Ali Essafi).
Children’s and animals’ voices, Berber dialects, Jbala and Hassani, songs, music, broken radios and cooking recipes cross our ears like so many travel notes, fragments collected in residence or processed in the studio. Fragile and hopeful, these sounds bear witness to the diversity of languages, cultures and imaginaries in today’s Morocco. They underline the artists’ interest in sound and listening in the service of quasi-ethnographic practices and participatory interventions in peripheral and often marginalized regions, inviting popular knowledge to the heart of their artistic sensibility.