Collaboration in the Making: La Fabrique Review
By Mizuho Yamazaki
“La Fabrique is not conceived as a moment of cultural exchange, but as a living process—one that privileges shared time, place, and story over spectacle.”
Saudi Arabia and France have worked hand in hand to build new pathways for cultural collaboration, particularly since 2018. Their partnership has long found a luminous stage in AlUla, but more recently, it has shifted into a new and dynamic spotlight: Riyadh.
La Fabrique / صنع emerges as a Saudi–French platform for artistic exchange and creation, led by Riyadh Art under the Royal Commission for Riyadh City (RCRC), in partnership with the French Institute in Saudi Arabia. Opening at Riyadh Art in the JAX District on January 22, 2026, the initiative unfolds as both exhibition and living laboratory, hosting events, performances, and research-driven encounters that aim to deepen artistic and cultural ties between the two countries.
Rather than framing collaboration as a temporary crossing, La Fabrique positions itself as a long-term process of co-working, co-researching, and co-producing. It invites artists and audiences alike to engage with evolving practices shaped by shared time, place, and storytelling.
Le Majlis: A Space for Exchange
The site is divided into three interwoven sections: “le majlis,” “the exhibition,” and “the movement.” The experience begins with “le majlis,” an open, hospitable platform for talks, workshops, screenings, live music, and culinary encounters. Here, visitors are welcomed into an atmosphere of immediacy and conversation, where French and Saudi creatives engage in direct, informal exchange.
Rather than functioning as a prelude, le majlis establishes the exhibition’s underlying ethos: collaboration as dialogue rather than display. The space encourages lingering, listening, and participation, foregrounding process over product and encounter over outcome.
The Exhibition: Dialogues in Image and Time
The Digital Gallery unfolds as a carefully choreographed field of visual dialogue, presenting video installation, digital art, photography, and film. Works are positioned to mirror and respond to one another across national, historical, and conceptual boundaries, creating a sense of call and response between French and Saudi artistic voices.
Visitors are welcomed by we will climb to heaven if we have to (2025), a short film installation by Mohammad Aflaraj. Recently awarded the Art Basel Emerging Artist Award, Aflaraj frames the simple act of climbing a palm tree as both metaphor and passage—linking past, present, and an uncertain future through a gesture that becomes ladder, ascent, and aspiration.
Facing this work is Hyperphantasia, from the origins of images (2022) by French artist Justine Emard, who led the France Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka. Emard traces the deep history of image-making, weaving together prehistoric cave art, artificial intelligence, and dream data. The installation suggests an unbroken thread between early human mark-making and speculative, machine-generated futures, positioning memory and imagination as shared terrain between human and technological vision.
Immersion & Interaction
After the two installations, visitors encounter a mysterious cubic structure. Inside presents two immersive, interactive artworks by Nasser Alshemimry a.k.a. DesertF!sh and THÉORIZ. The work by Alshemimry, Tidal Traces (2026), responds to visitors’ presence in the structure through real-time fluid simulation. As movement produces ripples and turbulence, and stillness allows the system to settle, the audience becomes a living variable, leaving traces that gradually fade and recombine. On the other hand, the French artist studio prepared a collective experience, ACT (2025), which transforms music into a shared, real-time language where sound and image converge, inviting participants to collectively complete an ephemeral moment of synchronized listening and visual experience. The seemingly opposite works take turns in the white isometric system, allowing visitors to use not only their vision but also all their bodily senses.
The Last Room
In the last room, visitors are guided to photographs of Julien Rahmani and Nora Alissa, which bridge the exhibition into films and performances, the section titled “the movement.” Rahmani’s photographic series from 2023 to 2025, “Al haraka baraka (movement is a blessing),” portrays a new generation of dancers through empathetic, collaborative documentation of suspended moments and expressive gestures, capturing cultures in transition and presenting movement as a shared language that challenges stereotypes and affirms contemporary artistic expression. Likewise, “LI’B” by Alissa, a photography series made in 2014, explores how people and places intersect at the boundary of the material and spiritual, using double exposure to layer traditional Saudi dances into gestures that become traces of memory, ritual, and cultural transmission. They are also symbolically exhibiting the works Untitled, LI’B (2014) and Motion, Riyadh (2025) next to each other.
A Platform in the Making
Foregrounding exchange between artists, cultures, technologies, and bodies in motion, La Fabrique positions itself as a living platform for Saudi–French artistic collaboration. Works by Saudi and French artists are curated not as isolated statements but as responsive pairings, linking past and future, heritage and possibility. The new attempt to enrich the cultural dialogue between the two countries reveals a form of collaboration that is dynamic, porous, and continuously in the making. La Fabrique is not merely an exhibition to be observed; it is rather a shared space to be inhabited, one that frames cultural partnership as an evolving, embodied practice rather than a fixed outcome.
Naso Correspondent: Riyadh
Mizuho Yamazaki
Mizuho Yamazaki is a Japanese independent curator, researcher, and writer based in Paris and Riyadh. Through the lens of the Middle East, she is dedicated to amplifying the voices of socially underrepresented communities for cultural decolonization.
Yamazaki has worked in museums in London, New York, Tokyo, and Paris and has curated exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong. She has also authored and served as a panelist for a variety of media and events worldwide.
Edited by Soraya. Copyright of Naso Art Journal.