Sara Ouhaddou

For French-Moroccan artist Sara Ouhaddou, rolls of cloth, pieces of pottery and shards of glass are all messengers delivering trace evidence of cultural histories living and lost. The presence – or absence – of craft speaks to her of the ebb and flow of eras and communities, especially within the Arab world. History is disjointed, but, Ouhaddou believes, we need even more disruption to fill in the gaps.

“I think with a strong base, we can break the rules,” explains Ouhaddou on a video call from her home in Marrakech. “Then we can invent. This is how we keep our culture, it’s not by doing the same thing all the time.” Ouhaddou’s work has uncovered – and speculated on – early Arab influences on the Côte d’Azur, sought comparisons between Japanese and North African crafts, and analysed the history of alphabets. In the past decade, she has shown in the Palais de Tokyo and Galerie Polaris in Paris, at Art Dubai and in the Marrakech Biennale, presenting works created in partnership with artisans, objects that are often informed by fact but occasionally flirt with fiction. There are embroideries of petals and leaves, but also ceramic bones and columns made of soap. They are like the fancies of an archaeologist-turned-novelist.

Ouhaddou’s practice draws on the age-old skills of craftspeople. So, I ask, is she making objects herself or directing others? “It’s more complex than that,” she says. “They’re making, I’m making.” Her “protocol of work” involves years of historical, anthropological and scientific research – “whatever comes to my hands or my brain” – during which she collects information on specific crafts, regions and communities. She then meets with craft practitioners and seeks to make their traditional techniques relevant to a contemporary audience.

The idea, she affirms, is to “deconstruct” the story of a craft and then make the ancient methods relevant for a modern economy. Her artwork is just the manifestation of those actions. “Of course, I want it to be beautiful,” she says, “but it begins with a conversation.”

For Ouhaddou, the spur is not the resultant rug, pot or glass panel. Early in her career, she realised that she “didn’t care about objects, it was all about the process and the people. The process that was happening inside myself. How I could change someone, how someone changed me. The values of the tools we exchanged.” With her warmth and humour she is an unlikely research-based artist, talking about tactility and breaking down boundaries between the atelier and the workshop, rather than dry academic theories.

Living in Marrakech has allowed Ouhaddou to engage with a culture in which craft is firmly embedded in the national character. “It has passed through time and space since Neolithic times. It never stopped. Even now that 90 per cent of the population want a new iPhone, you still find a tagine in the house.” She was born in 1986 in Draguignan, a town in the south of France. “Marseille was the closest city where we could identify Arabs like us,” she recalls. Her parents are first-generation immigrants from Morocco, farmers who came to work amongst the olive trees of Provence. “When you’re a farmer, you’re also a craftsperson. It goes together,” says Ouhaddou. “My mum wove textiles for the house.”

After studying product design at the Ensaama School of Art & Design in Paris, Ouhaddou worked in retail design at L’Oréal for brands such as Lancôme and Armani. She remained with the company for six years but eventually concluded that she was not suited to the corporate life. “The problem was the structure,” she says. “Waking up at 8am to go into an office, working like a crazy person, giving all my creativity. There I felt like I was in a big machine that was compressing my brain.” The world of luxury goods gave her “strong bones” however, teaching her how to work autonomously within a team. Plus, of course, there was the pay. “The money I made was the money I used to do my own thing. The art side is something I never abandoned,” she recalls. “That’s life, you work in a company and you do what you like on the side. But then ‘the side’ won.”

Her first artistic project – creating prototypes of ceramic works and pieces that blended embroidery with rubber – led to a residency at the French Institute in Marrakech in 2014. The project won her a grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, after which her life changed, gradually and organically. “I never decided, ‘Ah tomorrow I’m going to be an artist’,” she smiles.

In 2020, Ouhaddou presented a series of cryptic works at the Musée d’Histoire de Marseille as part of Manifesta 13 Marseille. These included Je te rends ce qui m’appartient / Tu me rends ce qui t’appartient (I Give You Back What’s Mine / You Give Me Back What’s Yours) (2020), a collection of peculiar artefacts and archaeological fragments that referenced a forgotten period of Arab-Andalusian influence on the French Riviera during the Middle Ages. They were, in fact, figments of the artist’s imagination, fictional relics that speak of two centuries of Arab-related history that has been glossed over in French museums. Other pieces incorporated silkscreen printing and jumbled alphabets.

Two residencies in Japan led to Ouhaddou’s ongoing Atlas-Aomori series (2017) of “mental cartographies”, which map the use of nature-inspired motifs, from her mother’s Moroccan rug to shards of pottery in Tokyo. In Japan, embroidered kimonos communicate personal information to the rest of society through an understood code of patterns, signs and symbols. Moroccan carpets do something similar, she observes. The same language, different accents.

Glass is Ouhaddou’s new muse. A Syntax (2020–ongoing) is a series of stained-glass windows that turns minimalist Islamic mosaics into a fractured and imaginary alphabet. Meanwhile, other recent works draw on her research into glassmaking in the Arab parts of the Mediterranean between the nineth and 10th centuries. Another new body of work, questioning the relationship between artists and the craft community, will be shown at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden in Marrakech in 2024. Looking further ahead – and upward – Ouhaddou intends to explore the widespread use of stars as motifs by potters, weavers and other craftspeople. “How seeing the stars in the sky is important to human development, and how it is disappearing,” she explains. It is an apt subject for an artist who addresses both the universal and the temporal. Stars, like civilisations, disappear, but their trace elements continue to shine.

This profile first appeared in Canvas 111: Crafting the Contemporary