El Fenn embarks on ambitious artist residency celebrating African craft

The intersection of heritage and innovation rarely manifests with such intentionality. Within the layered walls of El Fenn in Marrakech, an ambitious curatorial vision has taken root: six of Africa’s most compelling contemporary artists have arrived to spend the coming months in residency, each engaged in the delicate work of excavating tradition and transforming it into something startlingly new.

The project, titled EJO, emerges as an extension of Everything Old Is New Again, a commitment to the vital conversation between ancestral craft and contemporary artistic practice. Curated with precision and cultural intelligence, the residency brings together artists working across multiple media, each tasked with a singular challenge: to take an age old artisan technique and reimagine it as a vehicle for modern expression.

Among the first artists to occupy this creative sanctuary is Zizipo Poswa, a South African practitioner whose work with ceramics has begun to unfold within El Fenn’s evocative spaces. The particulars of Poswa’s practice take on added resonance through an exchange of technique and philosophy with Poteries Erghini, Morocco’s celebrated ceramic artisans. What emerges from this convergence is something neither purely traditional nor entirely contemporary, but rather a luminous dialogue between two distinct lineages of craft knowledge.

A Living Archive of Practice

El Fenn has long functioned as more than a physical location; it represents a commitment to the preservation and evolution of African artistic discourse. By hosting these residencies, the space becomes a living archive where technique becomes conversation, where the hands that shape clay or work with forgotten methods are paired with minds intent on pushing those methods toward unforeseen futures. The work remains in progress, still unfolding, which is precisely where the most vital creative moments reside.

The residency has been conceived as part of a broader initiative commissioned to celebrate the contemporary African art landscape. Over the coming months, additional artists will arrive, each bringing their own practice, their own relationship to tradition, their own vision for what heritage can become when placed in the hands of practitioners unafraid to challenge its boundaries.

For those following the evolution of African contemporary art, El Fenn’s commitment to this project signals something essential: that tradition need not be archived or preserved in amber. Rather, it can be inhabited, questioned, transformed and renewed by artists deeply engaged with both its integrity and its possibility. The work happening within these walls over the months ahead will speak to something fundamental about creativity itself: that the old and the new are not opposing forces, but rather partners in the endless invention of meaning and form.

Imagery courtesy of El Fenn (@elfennmarrakech).