Tre volontarie italiane hanno partecipato al progetto ESC Team up Marocco, in concomitanza con la Urban Art Week di Tangeri, organizzata da LiveRoom. Questo è il racconto di Alice.
From September 3rd to 7th, LiveRoom proudly hosted the 9th edition of the Urban Art Week Festival. For five days, the space was filled with creativity, workshops, competitions, and performances that brought together children, young people, and adults in the spirit of urban culture.
This year’s edition featured artistic workshops, a dance competition in collaboration with @detours, a graffiti contest, and it all concluded with a vibrant hip-hop & rap concert. We were also thrilled to welcome volunteers from Italy, who joined us through the European Solidarity Corps program and contributed to the festival’s success.
Once again, Urban Art Week proved to be a space for expression, community, and the celebration of contemporary urban arts.
**"Our business is to count the stars, star by star,
to chew the wind’s haughty arrogance
and watch the clouds for when they’ll throw us a handful
and if the earth goes far away from us
we’ll say everyone is possessed,
everyone has lost their mind,
and time — never will its letters fall between our hands
until we write what we are."**
— Driss Mesnaoui, 1995
Where have I been? Africa or not Africa? Maybe Europe?
Muslims or not Muslims? Arabs or not Arabs?
Poor or rich? Dirty or clean? Modern or backward? History or industrialization? Sea or city?
Tangier is a port city, yes, but unlike all others, it’s the knot at the final branch of a continent, the last breath of “the other side” of the Mediterranean (as if the sea were enough to divide or unite). Or maybe it’s the first?
In its streets, there’s a sense of something arriving and then leaving — you feel it can’t stay still, it doesn’t know how to hold its breath. A border, of what exactly is unclear — but it’s always bustling with people, unexpected, ready to surprise you.I left with no expectations.
I returned with no answers.I lived the way I ate — spicy and bittersweet, centered on sharing, without schedules but only when there’s hunger, without measuring because what matters isn’t how much you take, but that everyone gets everything.
Tangier is both a city of transitions and departures — attracting and repelling — and especially in recent years, it’s had to welcome people from all directions, rediscovering new policies of integration, but also new social tensions that often have, and still do, spill into violent confrontations.
That’s why strengthening social cohesion through cultural integration is fundamental.
And that’s exactly where the LiveRoom project fits in — perfectly aligned with the city where it was born.
This space manages to be at once subtle and explosive, delicate and impactful — and we found ourselves immersed in the constant movement of the festival’s organization.
How they managed to bring all those people together, to build and carry out such a rich, engaging program in so little time, I truly can’t explain — unless I surrender to the idea that the energy poured into it could only have come from the heart as its sole source, and hope as its only path.
It wasn’t easy for us to fit into the fast-paced work rhythms of a reality we didn’t know, one we couldn’t access even through language.
We filmed videos, scheduled posts, made stories, interviews, voice-overs, and so much more — and in the rapid unraveling of those days, maybe we didn’t even have time to notice the magic we were immersed in.
Saad, Jiji, Fati, Ayoub, Walid, Yassin, and everyone else — I will never find the right way to thank you,
because what you left me with is perhaps beyond the limits of words.
“Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties. However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds.”
— bell hooks *
It’s during these fifteen days that I truly felt the strength and resilience that friendships can have — the kind that hold up the walls of LiveRoom, the kind that lie at the foundation of a community that truly works and impacts what surrounds it.
In the streets around LiveRoom, in the eyes of those who crossed its doors before and during the festival, I too managed to catch the thread that connects the breath of every young person I met. LiveRoom is a second home for anyone who needs one.
During the filming of the documentary, Ayoub and I discussed the questions to ask during the interviews to gather different perspectives on the festival. But I couldn’t get one question out of my head:
"Which of your needs does this space respond to?"
That need for an answer didn’t come so much from a concrete inquiry, but rather from a human urge to feel that what I carry in my gut is also felt by the person in front of me.Not social, not economical, not cultural but human.
The strength of the whole project, in my view, lies in the trust that the young people have in each other, and in their ability to self-organize to carry out projects: finally, the adults "step aside" and remain in listening mode.
One day, one of them told me:
“Don’t think in maybes, ifs, or buts — think that you’ve already done it.”
Because it’s true that the task of the youth is to “count the stars”, to take everything, and to fight so that no one breaks us, and so that this world doesn’t collapse until
we’re the ones to write what we are.
* bell hooks was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic; she chose to spell her name in lowercase to shift attention toward her ideas rather than toward her identity.
