At the first light of dawn, when the world lingers in semi-slumber, Amina Saoudi Aït Khay sits gracefully at her loom. Weaving becomes her form of meditation, her thoughts suspended in midair, full of suggestions. Concentration guides her every movement. The act is both haptic and acoustical, as she strums across her warp threads as if they were the strings of a harp, plaiting her weft into them, composing her own melody, warbling alongside the echoes of old Arabic music.
The process imposes an ungovernability; for when one is weaving, in pursuit of the pattern, they are met by an indeterminacy in discerning the immediate or final fate. One can only meticulously observe the coordination of the fragments as they rhythmically assemble and take shape. No obsessive foresight can extract clues from the blankness of expectation. Patience is required— a quality that Saoudi has cultivated throughout the course of her practice. Yet, she does not abide by any physical or mental compositional formulae; rather, she tolerantly embraces the accidents that cross her trajectory. She leaps into the tumbles; she delights in the deviations and detours, while also modulating their pathway upon her plane. Oftentimes, these protean interruptions lead to other possibilities, rather than delimiting the composition.
This exhibition traces the trajectory of Moroccan artist Amina Saoudi Aït Khay’s work from the 1990s to the present, bringing together both her silk paintings and tapestries. The zigzag arrangement, though altogether orderly in appearance, is punctuated by a cluster of patterns that resemble cell multiplication, stretched both vertically and horizontally, all while maintaining a geometric elegance. Yet they conquer chaos into delicate submission; a distinguishing harmony comes forward. The absence of a cardboard or pre-planned template permits her intuition the freedom to flow. We must not, however, confound the perpetual movement of her cobweb-like lines and motifs with repetition, as some of her compositions teem with serpentine, sinuous rows of colour— both in continuity and variation. There is a precedence of the moment, an emancipation of the register of weaving from the constraints of repetitive frameworks, rooted in her early engagement with silk painting. In the early 1990s, Saoudi began her studies in this medium, where her practice was defined by a deliberate refusal to conform to the conventions of mere reproduction or reliance on prescribed motifs. Using the traditional gutta technique, the liquid traces a barrier on the fabric surface as to “prevent the dye from spreading, allowing a controlled design to be painted”.[1] Though this technique demands swift execution, she opted for experimentation with her own designs, even at the risk of unpredictability. Experimentation is a central thread in the context of her work.
Its genesis lies in the transmission of textile craftsmanship and know-how of Amazigh tapestry, passed on through generations, by her mother Zineb Kadmiri, a weaver of repute. This inheritance, tenderly safeguarded, is preserved and honed, allowing the tradition’s aesthetic capacity and potential to expand beyond parochialism, by dint of an intimate expression. The artist would recall her mother’s storytelling, as an accompaniment to their daily weaving sessions— how her mother, with elusive care, would never fully narrate a story, as to keep them in quiet anticipation of the next day’s session. Her retelling of this ritual beckons forth this quote, “the poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands”.[2] I am compelled to inevitably draw upon the latent yet evident link between poetry (that is text) and weaving. In Latin etymology, texo means ‘to weave’, and its participle is textus, which also means ‘text’. If we proceed with intent, crossing the fog of our memories, will we behold in her weaving a narration rescued from evanescence?
In the words of Saoudi’s brother, “the tapestry represents a whole chapter of our family’s history... the art of weaving encourages its apprentice to engage in a contemplation that leads down the most winding paths”.[3] There is the gesture of honouring her heritage in all its historical and personal depth and resonance. This ancestral tradition is neither entirely forgotten nor reductively categorized. Her call lies in an attempt to stir the throbbing of a memory that seems fleetingly distant, but fondly close to her heart. A sincere autodidact, Saoudi treads a familiar topography, while allowing her curiosity and imagination a window into spontaneous wandering, infusing her œuvre with a subjective contemporaneity.
In a timeline dominated by speed, each tapestry becomes thus a unit, a module of time, inhabited by an elongated temporality, as the exacting process for one piece can stretch over months on end. It calls on us to regulate our tempers in an agitated world. It reminds us not perish in monotony nor succumb to the desperation of lost time, but to flicker in the vivacity of life and mind, with a warm, unhurried bearing.
Racha Khemiri
Tunis. December 2024.
[1] Kennedy, Jill, and Jane Varrall. Silk Painting. Courier Corporation, 1994, p. 64.
[2] Darwish, Mahmoud. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. University of California Press, 2013, p. 86.
[3] Nour-Eddine Saoudi qtd in. Mernissi, Fatima. Les sindbads marocains: voyage dans le Maroc civique. Marsam Editions, 2004, p. 89. Translated by Khemiri.
