حوار
Because the threshold is everywhere in this work. When you enter an artisan’ s atelier in Morocco, you cross a threshold. The artisan welcomes you on the other side. That transition is a ritual. I wanted visitors to Asətta to experience that crossing more than once. Some visitors will simply walk through and feel the materialthe wool, the scale, the sense of the artisans’ hands. Others will stop to discover details: a lion drawn from a Middle Atlas motif, beaded animals, and jewelry inserted into a reactivated opening in the Arsenale wall. And then there is the gilsa, the sitting area found in artisan workshops. You can sit there as light passes through an open woven band, casting shadows across the space. Nothing in the installation is accidental.
You once described Morocco as a“ museum under the open sky.” What does that mean to you?
An architect I knew, Jacqueline Alluchon, used to tell me to pay attention on laundry day, when families hang their rugs and blankets outside. Ce sont des musées à ciel ouvert— museums under the open sky. The hasïra( a woven straw mat), the hanbel( a plain woven wool blanket), and the boucherouite( a rug woven from recycled fabric scraps)— they are all part of that landscape.
In a sense, the entire Moroccan territory is already a museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’ s vitrine— its glass display case in New York that holds a nineteenth-century Moroccan carpet from Rabat in its Islamic Art collection— is simply one more room in a much larger house.
After Asətta, where do you go next?
Honestly, I don’ t fully know yet— and I think that’ s the right place to be after a project this large. I want to return to the field, to Morocco’ s different regions, and perhaps internationally, and run workshops again. I want to meet new artisans and build new relationships. And I want to work with my hands more directly. Maybe the next body of work will be 70 percent my own hands. I need to reclaim that gesture. And I want to go smaller. Asətta itself moves between the very large and the very small: an installation visible from across the Arsenale, and details you discover only when you come close. Maybe jewellery again. Something is cooking. I can’ t tell you the recipe yet.
Interview conducted by Mona Khazindar and Michele Anbar
MATAHEF. COM 103