We began 2025 with the Casa Árabe’s “Friendship” Award Ceremony for 2024, and this second edition of the prize was given to Prof. Waleed Saleh Alkhalifa, from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, for being one of the great promoters of the Arabic language and culture in Spain. The jury also decided to award an honorary mention of the Prize posthumously to Federico Arbós Ayuso, a translator and professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

During the semester that was then beginning, Casa Árabe dedicated its ”Country Focus” to Tunisia, giving that Mediterranean country the main role in many of our activities. In late March, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Migration and Tunisians Abroad, Mohamed Ali Nafti, on an official visit to Spain, gave a speech about the relations between Tunisia and Spain, as well as holding a meeting with Spanish companies that have interests in his country.

In collaboration with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MACAM Tunis), Tunisia’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs and the Tunisian Embassy in Spain organized the exhibition “Tunisian Enlightments,” which showcased a carefully curated selection of works by Tunisian artists (including both men and women).

Tunisian music was also given a space at our venues in Madrid and Cordoba. In June, we organized a concert and a master class with artist Syrine Ben Moussa, one of the few female vocalists of Arab-Andalusian music in Tunisia. However, these were not the only events. We also got the chance to enjoy the electronic music of Azu Tiwaline, the dance performances by the group Al Badil organized to mark International Museum Day, and some film, with the screenings of Silences in the Palace, by Moufida Tlatli, and Bab ‘Aziz, the Wise Sufi, by Nacer Khemir, with whom we then held a colloquium, as well as Les Enfants Rouges, by Lotfi Achour, all as part of the African Film Festival of Tarifa-Tangier. All of these activities have allowed us to get a closer look at the contemporary Tunisian cultural scene through its main role-players.

Along with Tunisia, Palestine continues to feature prominently in our schedule of events. From March through May, we were able to reflect on the image and concept of Palestine at the exhibition “Palestinian Comics: Individual voices, collective cry,” hosted by Casa Árabe as part of the program “Culture for Peace: Spain-Palestine” organized by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Palestinian Embassy in Spain.

Tatreez, the traditional embroidery of Palestine, continues to be the main focus of our workshops and conferences. In the months of January through March, we continued with our project “Threads of the Diaspora” (2024) , with a newly proposed collective work: “Embroidering Dreams of a Palestinian Garden,” with the assistance of professor and artist Maysun Cheikh Ali Mediavilla. This time around, the workshops received support from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and were held in both Madrid and Cordoba. In these places, we also were given the cooperation of artists Almudena Castillejo and Begoña Castillejo who, along with Maysun Cheikh Ali Mediavilla, created a work that intertwines memory, resistance and the avant-garde, merging elements of Palestinian and Cordovan heritage, in a large-sized installation that could be viewed at our headquarters in Andalusia at the same time as the Festival of Patios in that city.

In addition to these workshops, this spring we also saw events with traditional Palestinian dance: the dabke. Guided by Francisco Montero Lahsen, over seven sessions participants learned about the value of this dance as a symbol of Palestinian cultural resistance, as well as practicing its basic movements and steps. We saw the results on July 4 at an event where the group performed the choreography they had been preparing since May.

Watching film has been another way of increasing our awareness of the Palestinian reality. Through movies like Anatomy of Control and The Right to Watch, short-subject films by Gazan director Mahmoud Alhaj, ”The Roof” (Al Sateh) the first feature film by Kamal Aljafari, with whom we held a colloquium, and the Oscar-winning No Other Land, by Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, we discovered many different aspects of the conflict. This conflict has also been reflected in the stage arts, as we could see during the event “From Nakba to Theater,” with the participation of actor and director Samy Khalil and playwright Ismail Khalidi, author of the play “Foot.”

Because books also allow us to delve deeper into the situation in Palestine, as demonstrated by the works of Teresa Aranguren and Najib Abu-Warda which we have presented throughout these months. However, these are not the only realities we have encountered: The Power of Mothers (Fatima Ouassak) and The West’s Failure in Africa (Beatriz Mesa) are a few of the works which we have shined a light upon. Also during our presentations, and in the proposals made at our Reading Club, and for yet another year, with our participation in the Madrid Book Fair, literature has formed a bridge for learning about different times and places. Nor can we leave out our meeting with María Dueñas and the link between her books and an exile that we have experienced in the exhibition “On Exodus and Wind: Spanish exile in the Maghreb (1939-1962).” After its time at our Madrid headquarters, it ended up in Cordoba, where it can be seen until October 24.

In this same Andalusian city, music has also played a resounding role. As has now become a tradition, we took part in The White Night of Flamenco with a concert by the group Yaleili, led by the flamenco singer of Syrian origin Ebla Sadek. And for the Cordoba Guitar Festival, the forth-fourth edition of which was celebrated this year, we proposed a fusion between the band Sinouj and guitarist Antonia Jiménez, at a grassroots sound meet-up.

In terms of our contributions to major events on the national scene, we participated in PhotoEspaña for yet another year. In March, the jury’s decision came out on the fifth edition of the “Nur / Luz” call for curators, to present the winning project at the festival in June: “What Lies in Between / Lo que queda entre medias.” A proposal in which the artists Taysir Batniji, Tanya Traboulsi and Tamara Kalo invite us to contemplate on the complex reality of their corner of the Arab world, marked by reconstruction, loss and resilience.

With regard to the teaching of Arabic, our Arabic Language Center (CLA) has lived through another very special half-year. Since the month of March, we have resumed our conversation meet-ups known as Dardasha, in which participants got the chance to practice their oral skills in both Modern Standard Arabic and Moroccan Darija and Levantine Arabic, in a relaxed atmosphere made more amenable by our teachers. In April, the King Salman Global Arabic Language Academy (KSGAAL) in Saudi Arabia chose our center to host its traditional “Arabic Language Month,” which gave our students the opportunity to take part in several competitions and training sessions, including some for teachers. With the arrival of summer, we brought back our intensive courses and our urban summer camp for boys and girls as of 3 years of age.

Education plays a very important role at Casa Árabe. That is why, for yet another year, we have continued to put on our Aula Árabe Universitaria event series, which has not ended its sixth edition, including the participation of 14 international experts and more than 700 students from 12 universities. Launched in September 2024, we held eight sessions in Madrid in 2025 devoted to topics such as environmental policies, food security, disinformation and AI-generated content, Euro-Mediterranean cooperation on migration, and bias and manipulation in media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza, in addition to other issues.

Focusing on the era of Al-Andalus, we have hosted conferences as part of our event series “Semblances of Cordoba: The Umayyad era in the first person,” which continued during the first half of 2025 with new sessions dedicated to chroniclers, legal experts, ambassadors, poets, theologians, scientists and members of the Christian community who were relevant during the times of Al-Andalus. The series will continue during the second half of the year with new and interesting characters yet to be discovered.

In addition to all this, Casa Árabe has participated in European projects such as Mosaïc, the purpose of which is to enable young Europeans to learn about, explore and strengthen Arab identity and culture in Europe. Within the framework of the program Culture Moves Europe / Creative Europe, in Cordoba throughout the months of February and March, we hosted artists Salima Hamrini and Nasri Sayegh. They were able to research and present their findings on the legacy of Al-Andalus through experimental photography. We also participated in the study visits and training sessions in the project Green Heritage, which introduced participants to features of Cordoba’s material heritage in images and to the city’s organizations working on this topic.

Up to here we have highlighted the most important events to have taken place during the first half of the year. You can relive these and other activities in the videos on our YouTube channel. And if podcasts are more your thing, follow us on Soundcloud and Spotify.

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