International Visitors ProgrammeInternational Visitors Programme

Artists Laila Hida and Yto Barrada were invited to the first programme. Yto Barrada was unable to attend and made a digital contribution. The main programme revolved around Laila Hida’s artistic practice. On Tuesday, 2 May, the public programme began with a discussion on Radio WORM, for which the Amsterdam-based artist Hanane El Ouardani was invited to provide, alongside Yto’s career of more than three decades and Laila’s 10-year career, the perspective of an artist in the second phase of her career.

On 3 May, the film _About Some Meaningless Events _was screened at WORM Rotterdam. On 4 May, Laila Hida visited de Appel with Alexandra Furtado Melville and led a seminar for the participants of her curatorial programme 2023 and Lara Khaldi, artistic director of de Appel. On 5 May, they had dinner at The Niteshop and over the weekend Laila Hida visited the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.

For the second part of the programme, Haydée Touitou and photographer Marie Déhé were invited. On Friday 1 December they presented their work and methods in the Printroom. At the invitation of Printroom, Rotterdam-based designer Nicole Martens provided the graphic design for the evening. Before the public talk in the evening at Printroom, they dined with participants Amah Edoh (cultural anthropologist - MIT), Dan Russel & Holly Argent (UK residents of Pavilion on the Water) and Rotterdam-based photographer Romy Zhang.

The next day they visited artist Suze Alba, educator (at ArtEZ) and publisher Hanka van der Voet. The programme concluded with a visit to the publisher and bookshop Sans Serriffe and a meeting with the writer Munganyende Helene Christelle.

Laila Hida (Casablanca, 1983) is a Moroccan artist and cultural activist based in Marrakech. Her work explores the intersection of vernacular and contemporary practices in local and global dynamics, questioning the projections and frictions of desires, ideas and concepts of manufactured fantasies about the East and the West. In 2013, she founded LE 18 Marrakech, a multidisciplinary cultural space in the medina of Marrakech. LE 18’s programme provides a platform for artists, curators and researchers to experiment, learn and share knowledge and experience through exhibitions, meetings, workshops and residencies, creating social and creative networks that benefit local communities.

Yto Barrada (Paris, 1971), a Moroccan artist based between Tangier and New York City, explores themes of survival, resistance and political courage in her work. Her art encompasses a wide range of subjects, including fossils, modernist history and the geopolitics of migration. Barrada returned to Tangier in the late 1990s and began The Strait Project, documenting the impact of the Strait of Gibraltar and Morocco’s narrowed border following the European Union’s 1991 Schengen Agreement. In addition to her art, Barrada founded the Cinémathèque de Tangier, a cinema that provides public access to a growing collection of films from North Africa and the Middle East.

Alexandre Furtado Melville (Tarrafal, 1988) is a Cape Verdean-Dutch artist, writer, critic and entrepreneur who believes that everything is political. Furtado Melville directed his first film, Noise in the Hood, as part of the exhibition There is no party so noisy as the one you’re not invited to at TENT Rotterdam in 2023. Furtado Melville is currently a partner and managing director of Concrete Blossom, chairman of the Steenbergen Scholarship for young Dutch photographers, a member of the Visual Arts Commission of the City of The Hague, and creative director of Furtado Melville. He is also working on his first book, an autobiography entitled God is Alive, about Europe through the eyes of a black African migrant.