In Rome, in the marvelous and rebellious library of the Yemeni Aladdin

Aladin Hussain Al-Baraduni, or “Aladino” as his friends in the Roman district of Centocelle call him, welcomes us at the end of a small corridor, behind a white desk, surrounded by canvases, books, and loose sheets of paper pinned everywhere. An artist from Yemen, Aladin has the feel of a man of experience, as the vibrant colors of his works, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2016 and 2022, also suggest.

Paintings that, like the one who painted them, have traveled a long way before landing within the walls of the “illicit library,” which has become the rallying point for an entire neighborhood. “I come from a small town lost in the middle of the desert called Dhamar. A place a little too cramped to contain the dreams of a teenager who grew up with rebellion in his blood,” confides Aladin, his gaze fixed on a canvas punctuated by prints of an increasingly deep blue.

The Yemen he grew up in suffered under the dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president assassinated in 2017 by the Houthis [a rebel political-military organization in the north of the country]. “We called him 'He Who Dances on the Heads of Snakes' because he was ready to ally himself with anyone, whatever the circumstances. In my family, we were dissidents, starting with my uncle Abdullah Al-Baraduni, one of the most prominent poets in the country [1929-1999]. He was blind, lived in Sana'a, and when I visited him, he dictated his poems to me, which I wrote down. At his house, we talked about politics, and among those who came to see him were people like [the Italian artists] Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, and [the German writer] Günter Grass.”

Seduced by this environment, Aladin soon settled in the Yemeni capital and it was there, with a few other artists, that he created the A