Conversation with Laila Hida and Francesca Masoero
ALT(ering) + SHIFT(ing) + COMM(uning): LE 18
Tuesday, October 6, 2020
The ALT + SHIFT + COMM hosts Laila Hida and Francesca Masoero of the Marrakech-based art space LE 18 to discuss artistic and curatorial practices in Morocco and collaborative formats of research and exchange across North Africa and beyond.
Created in 2013, LE 18 is a multidisciplinary cultural space that promotes artistic and cultural exchanges. LE 18 aims to support the local emerging art scene by bridging it with international ones while fostering a reflection on the role of contemporary art in the region through research, residency programs, exhibitions, and public gatherings. Located in the Marrakech medina, LE 18 offers a close proximity to the city’s traditional life, bringing its inspiring qualities into closer contact with the practices and reflections of the invited artists while critically investigating and attentively investing in the sociocultural transformations it is undergoing. The space is in dialogue with the city’s cultural scene, developing long term partnerships with artistic and educational institutions such as ESAV, Dar al-Mam’un, Dar Bellarj, On Marche.
Laila Hida is the founder of LE 18. In her artistic practice, she explores the boundaries of photographic practice, non-negotiated spaces of social practices, and the idea of transformation as a constant of time. Her current project, ‘Everything is temporary’ (2019) relies on her personal archives (textual and photographic) to sketch an archaeology of intimacy by observing the psychological variations (resilience, self-analysis) on the maturation of a work of art across time and space.
Francesca Masoero is an independent curator, researcher and cultural project manager. She is assisting director and curator at LE 18 and founding member of Madrassa Collective, a transnational curatorial platform. With a background in critical theory and political economy, she is interested in intersecting interdisciplinary research with collective curatorial methodologies and collaborative socially engaged art practices, investigating the role they may have as forms of resistance and as forces of transformation. Since 2017 she leads QANAT, a collective platform born at LE 18 which explores the politics and poetics of water.
