Materiae Palimpsest: Rewriting Moroccan Heritage at Venice

At the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Morocco’s national pavilion stands out for going back to their roots to explore earth as a building material using technology to elevate its features. Titled Materiae Palimpsest, the exhibition doesn’t simply showcase traditional crafts or architectural materials. Instead, it presents a dialogue between past and present — a layered, reinterpreted take on material heritage, deeply grounded in Moroccan realities.

At the La Biennale di Venezia, taking place from May to November 2025, the Moroccan Pavillion vividly showcases Morocco’s rich architectural heritage and the innovation of the Moroccan artistic scene on the international stage.

Material Palimpsest explores the theme of “earth architecture” by combining traditional Moroccan craftsmanship with contemporary digital technologies.

The Moroccan exhibition offers an immersive experience in the art of earth construction, emphasising its durability, flexibility, and intrinsic beauty. This exhibition highlights how utilising earth as a local and renewable material embodies principles of a closed-loop system, minimising waste and maximising resource utility across various scales.

Materiae Palimpsest redefines the perception of collective intelligence in the act of building by highlighting the resilience and potential of Moroccan architecture in the face of current ecological and social challenges.

Through the shared wisdom inherent in earth construction techniques — passed down through generations — the project honours traditions deeply embedded in Morocco’s cultural fabric. The pavilion foregrounds earth architecture as an expression of Moroccan identity shaped by its diverse geography and cultural memory. By connecting material and method to Morocco’s sense of place, the exhibition affirms how built environments preserve deep-rooted traditions while offering adaptable, sustainable solutions for the future.

Instead of offering a visual catalog of Moroccan crafts, the pavilion engages the deeper layers of how things are made, who makes them, and how those practices shift over time.

Walls breathe with crafts of the region, tadelakt — polished but uneven with textures that vary across thresholds. Earth tones and mineral fragments offer traces of geography and time. Across the space, nothing is merely exhibited. Every material is in motion, layered like the palimpsest that gives the project its name.

This conceptual and physical layering is the result of a collaborative process led by Moroccan architects Khalil Morad El Ghilali and El Mehdi Belyasmine. Their curatorial work repositions Moroccan heritage not as a preserved past, but as an evolving system of knowledge — dynamic, plural, and often oral in its transmission.

At the heart of the pavilion are 72 pillars made from various forms of soil –rammed earth, adobe, cob, stone and brick – all traditional building materials from different parts of the country. The columns are made from prefabricated blocks held together with post-tensioning system to squeeze the blocks together. This post-tensioning system developed by El Ghilali with his practice Atelier Be was used to create buildings in Morocco that he claims withstood 2023’s 6.9-magnitude earthquake, the strongest ever recorded in the country.

In the centre of the pavilion, holograms showcase two artisans, illustrating their ancestral gestures and the tools and materials with which they work, bringing an almost ethereal yet very much real element into the pavilion. The pavilion also features the work of Moroccan artist, Soumiya Jalal, whose textile creations adorn the walls of the pavilion.

Behind this thoughtful curatorial gesture are the architects, who take their role as architects of the future, quite solemnly: “We try to approach identity through practice: through how we build and where, who we collaborate with, what kinds of knowledge we value. For us, being global means being rooted without being rigid.”

Unpacking the Palimpsest

SCALE: What does the title Materiae Palimpsest mean in the context of Moroccan material heritage?

Khalil Morad El Ghilali and El Mehdi Belyasmine: The title came naturally. We weren’t working with just a set of materials or crafts, but with a layered body of knowledge — something alive and constantly rewritten. A palimpsest, in its original sense, refers to a manuscript that has been overwritten but still retains traces of what came before. That felt like the perfect metaphor for Moroccan material heritage: never fixed, always shifting. Materiae Palimpsest became both a method and a position — to view tradition as something always open to reinterpretation.

SCALE: Were specific cultural or historical narratives integrated into the pavilion’s design?

Khalil Morad El Ghilali and El Mehdi Belyasmine: Absolutely. We explored how knowledge moved — through trade, colonisation, migration — shaping Moroccan architecture in complex ways. Rather than romanticise the past, we highlighted these frictions and adaptations. The pavilion doesn’t directly quote history, but lets it seep through spatial choices, materials, and gestures. Oral traditions — often unwritten — were central to how we thought about making.

SCALE: What challenges did you face in translating traditional crafts into contemporary architectural experiences?

Khalil Morad El Ghilali and El Mehdi Belyasmine: One challenge was avoiding the display of craft as folklore. Instead, we wanted artisans to be collaborators in pushing techniques into new contexts. That required building a shared vocabulary — combining drawings and hand gestures, software and tactile intuition. It also meant embracing unpredictability, which is often the very source of richness in traditional craft.

SCALE: Was there a particular craft that played a key role in the pavilion?

Khalil Morad El Ghilali and El Mehdi Belyasmine: Tadelakt was central. Often seen as just a decorative surface, it’s actually a complex and responsive technique. We used it not only on walls but over digitally-fabricated surfaces, allowing it to interact with contemporary geometries. This showed how traditional materials can participate in spatial and conceptual innovation — not just preservation.

SCALE: As Moroccan architects, how do you approach national identity in a global context?

We don’t see identity as a fixed style or image, but as a process that’s constantly evolving. For us, it’s about how and where we build, who we work with, and what knowledge we center. Being global doesn’t mean abandoning the local — it means carrying it forward, critically and creatively. We want to stay rooted without becoming rigid.

SCALE: Do you see the pavilion as a model for representing national identity internationally?

Khalil Morad El Ghilali and El Mehdi Belyasmine: Not exactly a model, but a proposition. We’re suggesting that identity isn’t something to be exhibited like an artifact. It’s constructed through relationships — with people, places, time. We hope this encourages future curators to dive deeper into their own contexts, rather than perform identity at a surface level.

SCALE: What do you hope visitors take away from the pavilion?

Khalil Morad El Ghilali and El Mehdi Belyasmine: That traditional knowledge isn’t about the past — it’s about reinvention and resilience. We want people to see materials and construction techniques with new eyes. And to rethink where architecture comes from: not just books or software, but hands, habits, and experiments. Many solutions we need are already around us, if we pay attention.

SCALE: How has the atmosphere at Venice felt this year? Any pavilions that stood out?

Khalil Morad El Ghilali and El Mehdi Belyasmine: Venice is overwhelming, but also full of powerful conversations you rarely have in daily practice. This year, many pavilions focus on care, repair, and slowness — which resonates deeply. Chile’s was striking for its political depth. Kosovo centered storytelling and the earth in a sensitive, inner way. Spain impressed us by showing how construction challenges could become tools to rethink housing. It’s encouraging to see architecture treated not just as a profession, but as a cultural and social lens.

SCALE: The Moroccan Spirit in One Word?

Khalil Morad El Ghilali and El Mehdi Belyasmine: Hybrid. Moroccan architecture has never been one thing. It’s layered, adaptive, open to contradiction. That hybridity — often seen as impure — is actually a form of intelligence. It allows things to coexist. And that’s something we believe in — not only in architecture, but in life.