Project 53
And the West Did Not Exist - Al’Akhawat
19th June - 31st July, opening reception Friday 19th of June, from 7pm
We traced the route on a map and discovered that the place we were searching for did not appear anywhere. Departures and returns, arrivals and permanences, encounters, but also delimitations, transgressions, and abrupt ruptures. We imagined the space between two places as a threshold full of lines, a choreography that shapes the territory. We realized that places are defined by gestures. However, not all the spaces produced by our bodies are documented. How, then, can one recognize belonging to a place that remains outside the institutional frameworks that name the world and the ways of inhabiting it?
”And the West Did Not Exist” is an attempt to narrate those intermediate spaces that we move through. To do so, the collective Al’Akhawat unfolds the chronicle of an imaginary journey through real places—nameless, familiar yet unrecognizable. Through the reproduction of procedures, documents, and artifacts that accompany us in our displacements, the collective seeks to materialize some of the undocumented gestures that acknowledge the existence within and of a threshold-space.
The main piece of the exhibition is a fabric that unfolds continuously throughout the space, creating a three-dimensional itinerary. The textile surface is intervened with photographs, texts, drawings, and embroidery, constituting a kind of landscape painting that proposes other ways of looking at the world. The retor, a material used for making garment prototypes, evokes the experimental and processual character of this journey, but also the corporeality present in any spatial narrative.
Alongside the fabric, various elements such as photographs, maps, and postcards are distributed throughout the space. This collection of pieces is articulated through the individual reflections of the collective’s members on the material memory of their families and the overlapping geographies to which they belong. At the same time, these souvenirs function as a counter-narrative to the spatial imaginaries generated by certain displacements that often ignore other forms of mobility equally fundamental in shaping the world.
The materiality of the documents intertwines with the soundscape that accompanies them. Throughout the exhibition, audio pieces can be heard that reclaim modes of existence and permanence beyond image and writing. This soundscape merges with images evoking a journey across land and sea; a sea that has a name, yet here becomes anonymous and universal—once again, a threshold crossed by lines and gestures.
The beginning and end of countless routes, this sea filters its waves into every aspect of the exhibition, connecting, in a constant ebb and flow, the artists with the territories and narratives navigating this space.
Interweaving memory and imagination, the collective Al’Akhawat turns to speculative fiction in this exhibition to trace a genealogy of movement beyond the map: a roadmap that revisits the past and probes the future, a language that invents territory and makes it possible to speak the world in other ways. By tracing an itinerary that narrates real places from a personal perspective, this exhibition expands the imaginaries, histories, and displacements that define our surroundings.
However, far from imposing a definitive narrative, “And the West Did Not Exist” opens up a space of exchange in which the visitor not only follows the traced itinerary, but also interacts with it, becoming part of a collective gesture of expanding cartographic rewriting.
Al’Akhawat is the result of the crossing of paths of five artists belonging to the North African–Spanish State diaspora: Sanae El Mokaddim Ayadi, Youssef Taki Miloudi, Karim Khourrou Gadour, Oumaima Manchit Laroussi, and Aicha Josefa Trinidad Gououi.
The call shop (locutorio) has been central to their first projects as a collective, with an awareness of the cultural, social, and political value of this meeting space. Notable projects include “Alló? Labas? “ (2024) at Nadie Nunca Nada No, in collaboration with Instituto Cervantes and Goethe-Institut in Madrid; “+212” (2024), at the Contemporary Biennial of Tenerife Espacio de las Artes; and “And the West Did Not Exist” (2026) at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
Alongside their artworks, they conduct workshops such as Stories among Al’Akhawat, where connections are created between the bureaucracy every migrant must undergo to justify their presence in a country and various artistic pieces addressing these processes, opening up space for invited participants to share their own experiences.
They have collaborated and participated in projects with institutions such as the Museo del Prado, La Casa Encendida, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Casa de Porras, among others. They are currently undertaking the Dar Al’Qahwa artistic residency at La Casa Encendida, with an annual and individualized programme.