Amina Agueznay, natural spun dyed wool, cotton, glue, galvanized metal
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Loft Art Gallery, Morocco: mapping intangible cultural heritage with Amina Agueznay

Once she came back to Morocco, Agueznay collaborated with government agencies to support artisans in their search for innovation and to help them commercialize their products

Amina Agueznay: a visual artist proud of her Moroccan heritage

Amina Agueznay is a Moroccan visual artist and architect, currently based in Marrakech and represented by Loft Art Gallery Casablanca. She was born in 1963 in Casablanca and grew up in what she defines «an artistic environment». Indeed, she grew up in the atelier of her mother, Malika Agueznay, who is an artist herself and was the first female student of the School of Fine Arts of Casablanca: «I was raised in a house where I was surrounded by art and, even though, being born in it, it was all natural to me, it definitely helped me to develop an eye».

After finishing high school, Agueznay went to study in the United States, where she got a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture from the Catholic University of America, in Washington DC. She then practiced as an architect for over eight years in Washington and New York before going back to Morocco. 

A shift from architecture to design in Morocco

Her return home coincided with a shift from architecture to design: «In the US I was dealing with buildings, in Morocco I wanted to create something that was small, wearable, and huggable. You cannot hug a building. Because of my childhood, I chose jewelry as a way to reconnect with Morocco». Indeed, ever since she was a child, Agueznay’s mother took her to bazaars and souks, transmitting her a passion for jewelry, as well as an attachment to Moroccan heritage: «But, above all, as a woman, she taught me resilience, persistence, passion. She was a pioneer and has always been a role model for me».

Once she came back to Morocco, Agueznay collaborated with government agencies to support artisans in their search for innovation and to help them to commercialize their products. These experiences were also a source of inspiration and a design practice for her, as they gave her the opportunity to research the geographical and ethnological origins of ancient processes and to map intangible cultural heritage.

From jewelry to installation: the role of scale in Agueznay’s artistic evolution 

One of the focal points of Agueznay’s artistic production is scale. While at first her jewels were wearable, as she started to design collections for the fashion shows they became gradually bigger and bigger, eventually transforming into installations: «I am going back to architecture with skill, but I am creating installations. This shift back and forth has become a sort of exercise for me». 

An example of this turning point moment is Jewels, a project in three phases dating back to 2010, which ranges from design concept to sculptural creation, to performance and photography. The Jewels Collection is composed of different series defined by technique and medium: sabra (viscose thread), a hybridization of recycled plastic bags melted onto maillechort (copper-based alloy), wood, and semi-precious stones. Here the medium becomes matter, invented by the artist and treated as if it were no different from traditional materials. The jewels’ scale turns them into «installations on the body»: bracelets stacked to form a gauntlet, cascades of quartz, wood and marble that drape from shoulder to hip, a sort of armor.

All of a sudden, Agueznay’s creations left the body and started adorning walls: «At that time I thought that I was making jewelry for space». This led her to start developing installations for specific spaces: «Now it is all about how I see a space and how I work within that space. The space determines the skills of the project and gives me the possibility to create an experience, to enhance the idea of the presence. Because of my architectural background, I find it more exciting to create installations rather than objects».

Agueznay’s artistic vision: building bridges with the hands

Agueznay now considers art as her full-time job: «I am always developing and always learning». A job that aims at «building bridges», at putting together people from different backgrounds, such as the local artisans she works with, the art gallery she is represented by and all the visitors who come to see her creations: «It is like a constellation of people. And it is also about building bridges between practices and know-hows. It is about curiosity, sharing, transmission». 

For example, art enabled her to establish a connection with Janna Syvänoja, a Finnish artist she never met, but with whom she shared the exhibition space at the Institut Finlandais in Paris in 2021. The two began to exchange reflections and to communicate through color and texture, leading Agueznay to develop her own visual and physical impressions of Finland and its forests with a series of installations made of natural spun dyed wool, cotton, glue and galvanized metal. Entitled Instants-Moments, it portraits the soft colors of lichen and northern light filtering through the tree canopy.

An artistic production in Morocco

At the base of Agueznay’s philosophy of work there is a collaborative approach and the reason why she decided to come back from the United States and to develop her artistic production in Morocco was that she wished to create participatory works that mirror her country’s history of local handicrafts: «The methodology is a collaborative process, involving individuals with invaluable skills. I draw from my own experience as an architect and designer, others draw from heritage skills, the mastery of a single technique or many. Each project begins with a spatial concept, based on a bidimensional structure or tridimensional environment». 

Designing jewelry earned her the title of designer, but Agueznay prefers the definition of «artisan-creator», as craftsmanship is essential for her: «The work by hands is super important in my practice». This also translates into working on the field: «I kind of have an atelier, but it is just for show. My real atelier is on the field, around the country. And in Morocco every village is very different from one another, which means that I have to get acquainted with every customer».

Agueznay’s art: modern architecture meets Moroccan traditional handicraft

When Agueznay decided to dive into Moroccan heritage, she brought with her the skills and the knowledge she had acquired during her architecture studies and practice in the United States: «The concept of teamwork is something that I learnt in the US, where I was trained as a project architect, making me comfortable in managing other people». 

From architecture she also derives the idea of constructing and the means to do so: «I am always constructing and I use modules and other architectural principles, such as the points that become lines, the lines that expand into planes and the planes that finally reconfigure the existing space». 

For example, in a Garden Inside, an installation series exhibited at Loft Art Gallery Casablanca in 2020, she overlapped the concepts of landscape and inscape in the representation of a garden made of natural spun dyed wool, cotton, glue, galvanized metal, painted galvanized metal and painted wood, all put together following architectural principles of verticality and space between things.

In her art Agueznay also attempts at merging her architectural background and designer skills with Moroccan culture and tradition, which «is much more than just the technique, it is how the women sit, do they sing, do they speak tashelhit».

Somerset House in London, 2022

She likes to play with the different times and spaces of the western world and her motherland – the fast pace of the former and the slow pace of the latter’s handicraft, the geometries of modern architecture and the texture and fluidity of the materials artisans use in their work, such as stones, paper, fibers, metals, wood: «At a certain point I began to wonder what I could use in order to be creative and I understood that I could use everything».

For example, in Portals, a series of textile installations exposed at Somerset House in London in 2022, Agueznay mixed architecture, weave and natural elements to imagine pieces of local landscape. These works were realized in collaboration with the women weavers of Tissekmoudine – a ksar village in southern Morocco that is part of an eco-rehabilitation project using sustainable methodology to empower the local population – and were inspired by one of the primary architectural elements of the ksar itself: doors. Agueznay and the craftswomen of the village drew each their own doors, then wove their sketches into wool in life-size scale, recreating the architecture of the ksar within the walls of Somerset House: the path to the oasis, the texture of shaved palm husk worn brown by the sun, the rough-spun undyed wool.

Agueznay’s language: artisanship and Morocco

Through her cooperative projects with local artisans Agueznay has developed – and continues to do so – her own language, a series of recurrent themes and symbols. 

For example, with Curriculum Vitae, a project exhibited in the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris in 2021, she carried out an anthropological experiment, inviting weavers from all around Morocco to explore their repertoire of imagery and record it for posterity. She asked artisans she knew to possess the heritage skills specific to their geographic area to weave into woven scrolls the motifs they used in their rugs, as they were transmitted to them by earlier generations. If the motif had a name that was known to the weaver, it should have been woven in black against a natural ground, otherwise in white. The result was a sort of catalogue – suspended and unrolling onto the museum’s floor – of what has developed during the centuries in a visual language, an alphabet where some letters have lost at some time their name, maintaining only their symbol.

1-54 Marrakech

Loft Art Gallery will be participating at 1-54 Marrakech, the Contemporary African Art Fair from nine to fourteen February 2023. The fair represents 54 countries, from one continent, all in one fair. Amina Agueznay will be presented at the fair.

Loft Art Gallery, Morocco

Amina Agueznay is a Moroccan visual artist and architect, currently based in Marrakech and represented by Loft Art Gallery Casablanca. Ranging from jewelry to installations, her art is the result of a constant collaboration with local artisans, whose traditional crafting techniques Agueznay merges and innovates with her own architectural background.

Debora Vitulano

The writer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article.

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