Les Femmes du Maroc
In “Les Femmes du Maroc” Lalla Essaydi addresses the complex issue of female identity from her adult Arab and Western perspectives. Originally from Morocco, but currently living and working in Boston, the artist sets her arresting, large-scale colour photographs within an uninhabited family-owned house, where she spent weeks during her girlhood in punishment for transgressing the rules of gender conduct. Against this very same setting, she places her femmes; old women, brides and young girls, covering their bodies with waves of hand-applied henna calligraphy that extends onto the surrounding walls and floor. Through the combination of calligraphy, an Islamic sacred art-form reserved solely for men, and of henna, an adornment practice traditionally relegated to women, Essaydi crosses a prohibited threshold, foregrounding thereby an intimate female body beyond the encoded patriarchal structures and the stereotypical cultural patterns of the Islamic society.
Though abundant in words, the series reinforces a discontinuity between presence and absence, volume and vacuum; and it does so by means of a subversive minimalist aesthetic of crème nuances, which cancels all existing fissures and spatial boundaries. A cloud of a transparent spatiality revolves around bodies, white robes and veils, rendering them all into a one-dimensional blank surface. White and ethereal, Essaydi’s woman becomes plain decoration. Constrained not just merely between walls, but also within the tangled layers of a pre-existing iconography as a licensed symbol of fertility and purity, she is fated to visibility exclusively in the transitory moments of marriage, birth and puberty, alongside eggshells, sugar and virginal flowers. As such, the female identity is seen possessing no outlet for expression within a house, whose bounding walls project nothing but perpetual silence. However, it is in this confined domesticity, in this non-language and no-man environment, where fundamental distortions and rebellious actions of expression can be conveyed…
If, annihilated within the patriarchal hierarchy, the woman is designated a performative voicelessness, this lack of regulative expression certainly allows for her occupying a space outside the margins of given interpretations. Following the Lacanian “Pas-tout”, Essaydi’s female bodies, always in fluidity, arise as corporeal expressions of a semi-ghostly womanliness. But, whereas they might assert that “le femme n’existe pas”, at the same time, as bearers of flowing no-essence they generate oppositional alternative spaces of undiscovered meanings.
Beyond challenging femininity and Islamic tradition, Essaydi creates, both as a woman and an artist, an open contextual space, where the engagement with self-expression goes through the denial of a preconceived identity. In this respect, “Les femmes du Maroc” suggest a territory beyond representation, where femininity is less femininity than a topos, where the Orient is less a place than a topos, where aesthetics in itself is revealed as a congeries of references originating from a quotation or from an amalgam of some previous imaging. Caught somewhere in between identities, Essaydi’s mysterious white spatiality underscores all this as much as it becomes an efficient, wide-ranging tool towards the articulation of a visual language which speaks from this impermissible hidden universe.
Text: Natasha Christia
All Pictures: Lalla A. Essaydi
All Rights Reserved
Published in Next Level Magazine, 02/2008
In “Les Femmes du Maroc” Lalla Essaydi addresses the complex issue of female identity from her adult Arab and Western perspectives. Originally from Morocco, but currently living and working in Boston, the artist sets her arresting, large-scale colour photographs within an uninhabited family-owned house, where she spent weeks during her girlhood in punishment for transgressing the rules of gender conduct. Against this very same setting, she places her femmes; old women, brides and young girls, covering their bodies with waves of hand-applied henna calligraphy that extends onto the surrounding walls and floor. Through the combination of calligraphy, an Islamic sacred art-form reserved solely for men, and of henna, an adornment practice traditionally relegated to women, Essaydi crosses a prohibited threshold, foregrounding thereby an intimate female body beyond the encoded patriarchal structures and the stereotypical cultural patterns of the Islamic society.
Though abundant in words, the series reinforces a discontinuity between presence and absence, volume and vacuum; and it does so by means of a subversive minimalist aesthetic of crème nuances, which cancels all existing fissures and spatial boundaries. A cloud of a transparent spatiality revolves around bodies, white robes and veils, rendering them all into a one-dimensional blank surface. White and ethereal, Essaydi’s woman becomes plain decoration. Constrained not just merely between walls, but also within the tangled layers of a pre-existing iconography as a licensed symbol of fertility and purity, she is fated to visibility exclusively in the transitory moments of marriage, birth and puberty, alongside eggshells, sugar and virginal flowers. As such, the female identity is seen possessing no outlet for expression within a house, whose bounding walls project nothing but perpetual silence. However, it is in this confined domesticity, in this non-language and no-man environment, where fundamental distortions and rebellious actions of expression can be conveyed…
If, annihilated within the patriarchal hierarchy, the woman is designated a performative voicelessness, this lack of regulative expression certainly allows for her occupying a space outside the margins of given interpretations. Following the Lacanian “Pas-tout”, Essaydi’s female bodies, always in fluidity, arise as corporeal expressions of a semi-ghostly womanliness. But, whereas they might assert that “le femme n’existe pas”, at the same time, as bearers of flowing no-essence they generate oppositional alternative spaces of undiscovered meanings.
Beyond challenging femininity and Islamic tradition, Essaydi creates, both as a woman and an artist, an open contextual space, where the engagement with self-expression goes through the denial of a preconceived identity. In this respect, “Les femmes du Maroc” suggest a territory beyond representation, where femininity is less femininity than a topos, where the Orient is less a place than a topos, where aesthetics in itself is revealed as a congeries of references originating from a quotation or from an amalgam of some previous imaging. Caught somewhere in between identities, Essaydi’s mysterious white spatiality underscores all this as much as it becomes an efficient, wide-ranging tool towards the articulation of a visual language which speaks from this impermissible hidden universe.
Text: Natasha Christia
All Pictures: Lalla A. Essaydi
All Rights Reserved
Published in Next Level Magazine, 02/2008
