Curated by Hobisoa Raininoro
24 April – 17 October 2026
Fondation H presents Les Mains des Poètes, a solo exhibition by Moroccan artist M’barek Bouhchichi. Celebrating the richness of manual know-how and traditional craftsmanship in Madagascar, the artist unveils a new body of work created specifically for this exhibition by the hands of Malagasy and Moroccan artisans encountered in Antananarivo, Antsirabe, and Imi n’Tatelt, his native region in Morocco.
Here, the artisanal gesture is conceived as a form of poetry: a thought process and expression rooted in the hand, the body, memory, and everyday life. Wood, metal, clay, silk, paper, and sound form a sensitive vocabulary, where each artwork becomes a word, and each collaboration, a verse.
Les Mains des Poètes pays tribute to Madagascar as a land of orality and poetry, but also a land of writing. The project notably evokes sorabe, an Arabico-Malagasy script developed in the fifteenth century by the Antemoro, a community from the south-east of the island. Sorabe bears witness to the ability of Malagasy scholars, the katibo, to adapt a writing system—the Arabic script—to their own language and thought processes. In this spirit, M’barek Bouhchichi invited Malagasy designer Domi Sanji to create Matsaraba, a contemporary typeface.
Both open and partially opaque, this new script—interwoven with other languages introduced by the artist and his collaborators—unfolds throughout the exhibition across numerous works. It invites the viewer’s gaze to wander, read, decipher, and traverse the imaginaries they carry.
In collaboration with the workshop of Fitiavana Ratovo
Ny fanahy no olona [It Is the Soul That Makes the Human]
Sheet metal, metal, galvanised steel, copper
This stele draws inspiration from the Aloalo des Bucranes presented at the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, a showcase of French imperial power. Bouhchichi criticises the way cultures from colonised countries were reduced there to objects of study or exoticism, stripped of their symbolic and spiritual dimensions. Even today, many African objects remain housed in European museums.
Rejecting a logic of dispossession, M’barek Bouhchichi does not call for the restitution of a single object, but rather for the reappropriation of knowledge and of the power to recreate. Produced in collaboration with the metalworking workshop of Fitiavana Ratovo, this metal column topped with zebu heads bears the inscription Fihavanana in both the Latin alphabet and Matsaraba, a contemporary typeface developed with designer Domi Sanji. By re-enacting the aloalo, the work diverts its funerary function to evoke rebirth and symbolic repair.
In collaboration with the Tonia Vato Mineraly lapidary workshop
Pièce à Conviction #1, Angraecum sesquipedale
Granite
33.3 × 29 × 29 cm
Bouhchichi produces an exact replica of a tripodal lidded cooking pot from Madagascar, held in the collections of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. Carved from granite—a solid and enduring mineral material—this pot was made in the Tonia Vato Mineraly lapidary workshop.
The work is displayed in a vitrine, deliberately echoing the museum display device that distances the public from the object while sacralising everyday artefacts from elsewhere. This reproduction of a “confined object” questions the notion of restitution and overturns heritage-based logic: rather than demanding the original object, the work asserts the local capacity to conceive and reproduce it. Like the Malagasy orchid from which it takes its name—an orchid that survives only thanks to its endemic pollinating moth—Pièce à Conviction #1, Angraecum sesquipedale could only come into being in Madagascar, shaped by Malagasy hands.
In collaboration with the Fango pottery workshop and Madame Yvonne’s aluminium foundry
Le possible Buffet - Clay cooking pots, engobed stoneware, aluminium
178 × 200 × 49 cm
This installation stages the Malagasy tripodal lidded cooking pot preserved in the collections of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, reproduced in multiple versions. By recreating it in different materials within Malagasy pottery and aluminium foundry workshops, the work highlights the local capacity to reproduce it endlessly and to reinterpret it.
The spatial arrangement evokes the intimacy of family living rooms and display cabinets where the most precious domestic objects are kept. Placed on the shelves of a second-hand sideboard, these replicas shed their utilitarian status to become collective archives, transmitted from generation to generation.
In collaboration with Saadia Elouaziz, Moroccan weaver and embroiderer
Matrie, aza atao fihavanam-bato : raha tapaka, tsy azo atohy; fa ataovy fihavanan-dandy: raha madilana azo tohizana
[May your friendship not be like stone, for once broken it cannot be rejoined; but like silk thread, for if it frays, it can always be repaired and strengthened]
Wild silk weaving, embroidery, copper thread, henna dye
160 × 147 cm; 155 × 134 cm; 180 × 161 cm
This series of textile works pays tribute to Queen Soazara, a Sakalava sovereign whose story remains little known in Madagascar. The great-granddaughter of Queen Tsiomeko of the Kingdom of Boina, she was appointed Queen of Analalava by the French colonial administration in 1946. She stands as a symbol of the continuity of Sakalava traditional monarchies in a colonial and post-colonial context.
To tell her story, Bouhchichi works with lamba—traditional Malagasy textiles—woven in so‑called “wild” silk, embroidered with cotton thread by Moroccan craftswoman Saadia Elouaziz. The technique combines Malagasy and Moroccan know-how: traditional Malagasy tattoo motifs evoking the queen’s history are first embroidered in cotton onto wild silk, then the entire textile is dyed with henna. Resistant to the dye, the cotton thread reveals the embroidery while the silk absorbs the colour, creating a striking contrast.
In collaboration with the workshop of Fitiavana Ratovo
Izay mitambatra vato, izay misaraka fasika
[United like stone, scattered like sand]
Round wood, metal sheets, recovered cans
Variable dimensions
These sculptures are inspired by the traditional wooden scaffolding found throughout Antananarivo and elsewhere in Madagascar, marking construction sites in progress. Their structure contrasts apparent precariousness with actual solidity.
By covering round wooden poles with metal sheets and woven recycled cans, Bouhchichi invites the Fitiavana Ratovo team to materialise an idea of social construction, of bonds and union. Hard metal softens and bends to form a coherent, interconnected whole. The metal sheets are engraved with poetic fragments—tononkalo, hainteny (popular sayings). These scaffolding structures thus become surfaces of language visible in public space, poetic seeds offered to passers-by. Their assembly evokes the philosophy of fihavanana, a fundamental value in Malagasy society based on mutual support and the creation of balance.
In collaboration with Domi Sanji and Fango
La terre en nous
127 clay bricks
Variable dimensions
M’barek Bouhchichi takes a particular interest in sorabe (literally “great writing”), an Arabico‑Malagasy writing system developed around the 15th century by the Antemoro people of south‑eastern Madagascar. Invented to transmit historical, political and spiritual knowledge, sorabe was used for religious texts, chronicles, and astrological and medical knowledge.
For this exhibition project, Bouhchichi collaborates with Malagasy designer Domi Sanji to create the Matsaraba typeface. The result of sustained dialogue on writing, memory and contemporary issues surrounding sorabe, Matsaraba consists of 127 characters. Depending on their position within a word, characters take initial, medial, final, isolated or rare forms and are written and read from right to left. Each character represents a consonantal phoneme or a diacritical sign indicating vowels.
Bouhchichi then works with the Fango workshop to mould clay bricks corresponding to each character, used as printing stamps. The gradual wear of these typographic bricks inscribes writing within a fragile temporality: writing until erasure.
In collaboration with Domi Sanji, Fango, Tao Hay and Andrée Mathilde Ethève
J’ai une autre langue
Antemoro paper, mangrove ink stamp, silk thread
200 × 100 cm each
For this series of works on Antemoro paper, M’barek Bouhchichi collaborates with designer Domi Sanji on writing, transmission and the ability of cultures to produce their own forms of knowledge. From this collaboration emerges Matsaraba, a typeface composed of 127 new characters inspired by sorabe.
To transcribe these signs, the artist sets up a handcrafted printing press. Movable type is made by the Fango workshop, while the ink—derived from local mangrove—is produced by Andrée Mathilde Ethève. Bouhchichi prints these signs onto large sheets of Antemoro paper made from shrub bark using traditional techniques.
The printed phrases are fragments drawn from Madagascar’s oral heritage—proverbs, words of wisdom and expressions of transmission—recalling that knowledge in Madagascar was long passed down orally, forming another mode of education distinct from the Western school system.
In collaboration with Domi Sanji, Gloria Raharisoanirina and Randja Zanamihoatra
Bibliothèque #3
MDF bookshelf, 220 clay inkwells
208 × 157 × 32 cm
Bouhchichi designs a library composed of 220 clay inkwells, shaped by Gloria Raharisoanirina in her workshop in Antsirabe. Each inkwell is engraved with a letter in Matsaraba, the typeface developed with Malagasy designer Domi Sanji.
Referencing ancient writing tools, the function of the inkwells is subverted: no longer containers for ink, they become bearers of writing themselves. The text is no longer inscribed by ink but through another language—that of the hand carving clay.
Bouhchichi uses this typographic system to rewrite an excerpt from the poem Poeta by Randja Zanamihoatra (1925–1997), a poet, writer and passionate defender of the Malagasy language, and a leading figure in modern Malagasy literature. This act of transcription into Matsaraba asserts a reappropriation of writing codes more closely aligned with the Malagasy language.
Poet! Even before your fragile body took shapeSongs and images had already claimed you;Your life resounds again and again,For it is the meeting place of the “powerful,” near and far.You alone, Poet, carry within youThe Soul, while others bear only the mindBeyond thinking, loving and worryingThere is still “you,” infinite existenceThe Poet’s Soul transcends the corporealAnd passes through the three gates of the universeIt alone knows how to enter at onceInto the “unknown,” in an upward surge (...)— Randja Zanamihoatra
In collaboration with Ledama and Fango
Babakoto
Famelona wood, calabash, bass cord, steel strings, walnut stain
230 × 45 × 45 cm
Bouhchichi collaborates with Ledama, a musician and instrument maker from a family of instrumentalists in the village of Ambohimiadana, south‑east of Antananarivo. Together they create a musical instrument whose sound is inspired by that of the babakoto, the Malagasy name for the indri indri, the largest lemur in Madagascar.
Carved from famelona wood—literally “that which can be brought to life or activated”—the work carries a social dimension: like the cry of the babakoto, its music exists to bring communities together. The clay base symbolises grounding in the earth and territorial belonging. Activated through musical gesture, the work reveals an expanded conception of writing: in Malagasy culture, music and sound are forms of communication between humans, but also with the invisible, the divine and the ancestors.
Research Table
On this research table, Bouhchichi presents the structure of his thinking behind the conception of the exhibition Les mains des poètes. Each work is described as the result of encounters, dialogues and confrontations of ideas stemming from diverse themes that preoccupy the artist.
By sharing with the public the way the project was built, Bouhchichi presents it as a sequence of experiences that are both distinct and complementary. The collaborations undertaken raise questions about the nature of the object—its status, its relationship to society, history, politics, memory, the invisible, orality and the transmission of myths. This table brings together sketches, notes, fragments of thought, materials and doubts, offering direct access to a research process that reveals a collective rewriting of plural narratives.