And the West Did Not Exist - Al'Akhawat

Curated by María Gómez López & Gonzalo Fernández.19th June – 31st July, opening Friday 19th of June, from 7pm, part of Art Nou 2026.

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.

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.