Marwan Hemma
Whilst Marwan composes and writes on his own, it’s an entire community that lives in his mind. For him, every riff is a way of maintaining the social and political bond that connects him to his people. When he’s in an ascetic mood, he rises at dawn and sharpens his tongue to attack neoliberalism, censorship, racism and Islamophobia, which run through the contemporary art scene. Trained in classical and baroque music, he has since learnt to subvert the French language and his angelic voice, turning them into instruments of resistance. In the wake of his debut album “HASSAN”, he has set himself up at L’Abri to continue honing his slang, infused with the echoes of old Yamaha synths, and is preparing an EP, a second book and a live performance designed to make us both weep and dance.
Marwan Hemma, also known as 7EMA, is a Belgian-Algerian musician, composer and writer. 7EMA is derived from his surname حمّة†, ‘fever’ in Arabic.
Trained at Academy of Music in Basel and in Brussels, he became a classical guitar soloist and Baroque singer. In 2024, everything changed: he joined Caravane Tighmert, a residency in southern Morocco with Sahrawi musicians from the Azwafit tribe.
He left the classical music scene and discovered a different way of making music: social, festive and collective. This encounter reshaped everything: his voice, his language, his tools. From this break came HASSAN, his debut album, released on 28 August 2026. Electro-Arabic music produced in his home studio in Switzerland, composed between Algiers and the oasis of Tighmert: raï, Saharan rhythms, electro-pop. His voice, shaped by the Adhaan and tinged with Auto-Tune, expresses in Algerian dialect what French cannot convey. HASSAN speaks of communities, in the Maghreb and in Europe, of exile and of love.
You arrive calm, you leave sweating. You dance, you laugh, you cry, you reminisce. The same restlessness runs through his writing. Winner of the Fondation Leenard’s springboard prize for his debut novel, “La Voix Volée” (The Stolen Voice) Marwan brings his alter ego Marwene to life: we follow him as he navigates the Sahara, his mates’ nonsense and the state’s censorship of a song.
