Focus on - "Incarner le visible, Acter l'invisible" by Amina Agueznay

OF WOOL AND SILENCE

            In one of the Atlas regions where spring water and fine, free-range wool is abundant, the Berber women

are in their shaded workshops, carding, weaving, and knotting carpets as they have done for centuries.

            Immune to the spells of the moment, the women capture the perpetual symbols of their condition: as women, mothers, wives, guardians of a life grounded in the earth itself and agrarian rituals. Their designs transcribe shifts in the observable world, constructing cosmogonic stories and legends that sing odes to nature, and to dreams.  

            These weavers sit with dignity behind the threads of their world, and with precise, stylized strokes they weave chevrons, grids, diamonds, triangles, crosses, stars, herringbones, rivers, and khamssa, all designed to celebrate the salvation rains, to invoke fertility, to protect the new-born, to bless loving or fraternal unity, or accompany the dead into eternity.

            Are these stripped-down symbols not then the mark of their utmost humility before nature itself? Or a desire to reach to the heavens? Or perhaps, more simply, a self-portrait, an evocation of the most essential aspect of these women? That which holds death at bay, leaving their earthly trace in the form of silent scripture?

            Weaving richly ornamental carpets or simple Handira to protect against winter’s chill, these heroic women in oft-remote lands have recreated a space where legends live on, bearing witness to the vital energy that harkens back to the dawn of time.

            Isli and Tislit, the two parted lovers who filled a lake with their tears, encounter the lovely Tanit, goddess of fertility, childbirth, and growth. Worshipped since ancient times, the ram-god Ammon and the ewe Amen, as well as the moon god Ayyur, all have their symbolic and easily identifiable place.

     This pantheon of deities, often dissimilated or open to free interpretation, surely joins more intimate imaginings. Knotted beneath nimble fingers, they fill the warp’s blank page, and are welcomed to the loom like secret offerings.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN IMAGE

“How is the artist’s world – the creative gesture – shown to the World?

I create my own writings, engaging these moments of creation in a structure of woven wool, in which embedded artefact-jewels become patterns that sketch out the map of my own world.”

A.    Agueznay

Then comes the encounter with the Other, one who seeks to sustain the unseen language of female symbols, in a sort of sacred bond. She chooses the Henbel. An all-white Henbel, woven by the women of Khemisset. That one, the one covered devoutly by the weavers when it was finished, and left to rest in a corner of the workshop, waiting to be sent off to other skins, other travels, ready to be touched by other hands and other eyes.

First, to embody the visible: circumscribe the space and imitate the gesture, transforming it into image upon the screen of white wool, where anything might be written. Or erased.

Wipe away, obscure, dissimilate, unlearn and unravel its alphabet: Un-written signs, fragmented and questioning, form the link with the immutable repetitions of the weavers.

Then, break free: to re-enter the ineffable.

In order to follow its path in life, this Henbel must die a bit.

            The Other has sliced into it, a delicate incision that intentionally divides the white space here and there, making way for a void, gathering the surface to allow shadows to form.

            Not for long though, as this invisible act is quickly repaired by working hands, stitching gold thread into relief.

The shimmering gold of the Sabra is laid upon the rough texture of the Henbel, white and raw. As close as can be to the earth, plant upon animal.

            In the beginning, these relief-shapes were ornamental objects, made by the Other to adorn the body. They are now fragmented into simple forms, then stitched on either side of the cuts. Point, line, plane: reinventing form to return to the sign’s earliest state, to narrate and to die by the hand.

OF GOLD AND LIGHT

“I substitute myself for the woven wool. I am seated. The hands of the artisan hold out artefacts to me, slowly, one by one, in reference to the repetition of an ancestral gesture. Re-living moments. I adorn myself with these jewels, until they cover me. The gesture renders me a cocoon, a chrysalis, a sarcophagus. Is it also this rite of passage that will take me to my final posture, sitting here, the creating hands lying flat in front of me.”

A.    Agueznay

Filled with light and gold, these hands drape the body with its own ornaments. Layer upon layer, the body begins to disappear, bit by bit, until it is fully enshrouded. This skillfully-piled pyramid of artefacts that gleam with gold becomes a second skin, in place of the body. Thus covered, it is once more a chrysalis, and the jeweled finery forms its cocoon.

            Only the hands resting upon the knees remain visible: the unbreakable connection to the World, embodied in flesh, the thread that passes from the Other to the weavers. Gold perpetuates this union by offering its sacred protection, as if to set the body in this final, inalterable image. Slowly, by means of this alchemy, a dialogue begins between the heavens and the depths of the earth.

            But there is another fable - one you won’t see here - beyond this image. From now on, the moment of the image has taken the place of the moment of absence. This absence is the sanctuary of time before words, the temple where disappearance is conjured by a gesture of the hand, a hand like a wave, conjugating the rhythm of erasure with that of reappearance, in an eternal new beginning.