Lab X is an artistic residency and cultural exchange with international artists. Lab X sits within Artsadmin’s Artist Support programme offering a micro residency designed to provide artists with time, space, and money to develop their practice, without expectation of delivery.
3oubour | عُبُور: A River between Mountains invites artists to critically consider the concept of technical knowledge and innovation, not just as something which always has to be ‘new’, but also as existing within the realm of inherited and locally bound practices that go back several centuries, and how these revelations could illuminate ways of being, sustainable thinking and collective acting in-between local and global contexts.
The 3oubour cohort is made up of UK and Morocco based artists who use (or misuse) sculpture, architecture, raw materials and/or digital technologies. Across an online residency exploring alternative methodologies, and a one month residency in Fez (Morocco), the artists have interrogated material, ecology and industry before having the chance to explore performance through their Lab X residency, hosted at Artsadmin’s home in Toynbee Studios.
About the artists
Alia Hamaoui is a British/Lebanese artist based in London, whose multidisciplinary practice combines sculpture, image-making, and painting. She received her BA (Hons) in Painting from Camberwell College of Arts in 2018.
She weaves together layered fragments, muted tones, and lost histories, often blending print, painting, and ‘construction’ to shift between physical remnants of the past and the digitizing of memories. Through this, she explores how images—both printed and digitized—intercept our perspectives on historical narratives and cultural identities.
Nabil Himich (b. Jan. 1997, Meknes) is based in Marrakech, Morocco. He works at the intersection of architecture and literature to investigate political themes traversing the material narratives of the everyday. By juxtaposing painting, installation, writing, drawing, sculpture, and participatory forms, this mul3-layered work, being haunted by the aporias of postcolonial multilingualism and class hierarchy, broaches themes such as the singular and the multiple, unequal structures, spatial anthropophagi, the poe3cs of enclosure, the practice of staying. He often adopts notions such as ‘con-texture’ and ‘archi-texture’ to provide deconstructive schemes for thoughts and actions. These notions are also conceptual tools for narratives around the production and formation of place, the distribution of territory and knowledge, class issues and representation.
Mehdi Ouahmane (born in Casablanca in 1992) lives and works in Marrakech, Morocco. Mehdi graduated from the Art’com Sup Art and Design School in Casablanca (2013) and the National Institute of Fine Arts Tétouan (2019).
Mehdi Ouahmane encounters wandering NPCs (non-player characters) in areas scarred by mythical cataclysms. From these unexpected interactions, ambiguous—sometimes boring dialogues commence, to which Mehdi replies strangely with drawing, sculpture, collage, and 2D digital montage.
While floods, gas explosions, and earthquakes happen nearby, Mehdi would barricade himself with video games and animés. A delusional behavior; an adolescent attitude, that he adopts to find a certain logic to all the Confusion, into digital and fairy-like realms. As a form of escapism, Mehdi draws whimsical rooms where inner myths coat public/unspoken narratives and eco-catastrophes. These rooms function as prisms of contemplation, where NPCs, fragmented dialogues, and visual mosaics unfold, allowing us to grasp the Confusion through different perspectives and temporalities.
Mehdi has taken part in residencies at Misk Art Institute in Riyadh (2023), the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2023), and La Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille (2022). He has exhibited his work at Art Explora Festival in Tangiers (2024). He has won the Prince Claus Seed Awards (2021).
Mehdi has taken part in residencies at Misk Art Institute in Riyadh (2023), the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2023), and La Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille (2022). He has exhibited his work at Art Explora Festival in Tangiers (2024). He has won the Prince Claus Seed Awards (2021).
Monya Riachi is a multidisciplinary artist with a material and research driven practice. Her work engages with matter as a site of narrative and archive, through context- specific/responsive methodologies and formats. Her practice explores themes around the politics of land; the entanglement of historical geographies; relationship to time within chrono capitalism; and the agential realism of matter; amidst a broader meditation on universal ecological transformation. Her work is realised through sculpture, installation, moving image, sound, writing and performance, and engages creative specialists through its collaborative process of making, from musicians, writers, geologists, materials scientists and craftspeople.
Dima Srouji is an architect and visual artist whose work explores the ground as a space rich in cultural weight and potential for collective repair. She focuses on ruptures in the land, places where imaginary liberation is possible, and engages with materials like glass, text, archives, maps, plaster casts, and film to question what cultural heritage and public space mean, particularly in the context of Palestine and the MENA region. Dima’s projects often develop in collaboration with archaeologists, anthropologists, sound designers, and glassblowers, creating evocative objects and emotional companions that shape her practice.
“www” was born out of a serendipitous conversation, one which put things in motion to make the collaboration among the three artists happen. During an artistic residency in Marseille, Aïda and Lori who had previously met at another residency, decided on a last-minute switch from a studio session to the beach, a decision that led to an extremely generative and insightful conversation under the summer sun. Personal stories were exchanged, about trials and tribulations with colonialism, “post-colonialism”, the situation in Lebanon, and the global struggle/war over resources. This stayed with Aïda, who had been planning on collaborating with Imane, and who eventually came across the Youmein Festival open call on the theme of steadfastness in the face of catastrophe. It is as if this conversation on the beach allowed for everything to fall into place. One thing led to another: a title, a scenographic constraint, a brief for movement research…The project naturally took on a co-creation format, one of working collaboratively and without hierarchy, and that became one of the project’s core strengths.
The project was initially produced within the framework of Youmein Festival 2024, a festival grounded in the idea of having 48 hours to reflect, develop, and present a work. The work-in-progress was then selected to open the Art Explora Festival in Tangier, an event curated by Leila Hida/Le 18 in collaboration with Youmein Festival.
With only 24 hours of being in the same space at the same time, the project nonetheless continues to grow with regular virtual calls and a one-month residency projected for September 2025 in Fes as part of “3oubour | عُبُور: A River between Mountains” – an international residency project run by The Arab British Centre, A.MAL Projects and Takafes.
