Swide Magazine by Dolce&Gabbana

The beautiful yet strong images of Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi are a starting point of reflection based on traditions, exploration, and the female world.

“Thanks for making contact and for your interest in my work. I would be delighted to have my work in your magazine, I always liked having my work in fashion magazines.”
This is the beginning of a correspondence that connects the writer, myself, and the Moroccan artist who now resides in the States prior to a large and itinerant retrospective of her work in Morocco starting in April. Lalla Essaydi’s work can be seen at the Louvre. Art becomes the word we recognize from our schoolbooks. It’s not created for the Internet. However it breaks more boundaries and brings together human beings who live on the other side of the planet. Upon seeing her invite for the exhibit, I almost booked a flight, and I still could, without thinking Morocco was far. Haunted and captured by the force of her art, if it’s true that art creates a new language that breaks barriers but keeps cultural codes, I couldn’t help but recognize the same sense of belonging and escaping from a world in which certain traditions, the environment, are so particular that they almost smell like spices. 

“Orientalism” has always been, aesthetically speaking, the insurgence of a profound curiosity and mystery. Of living one’s own sexuality through the strict codes, the beautification and ritualization of it, the secret place where you are captive yet luxuriously enveloped. 

The word Harem comes from “Haram”: sin in Arabic. It’s also the place in which women live in seclusion. It’s a word I’ve heard so many times growing up and it explains well the beauty, the privacy of women, as well as the worst, a world controlled by men and the many ways in which a woman can sin in an Islamic country. In Lalla’s work, I have found both the prudence and delicacy in depicting the female subject, the same respect for culture, as well as the same soft voice of liberation from the dictates of men. The Islamic calligraphy that she draws on white sheets that create the setting for the photographs of women she takes, is in fact forbidden to women. Meet Lalla Essaydi.

What is the first image that comes to your mind when you think of your childhood? 
Lalla: Playing with paint and pencils in my father’s studio while he is painting. He was a painter but not by trade, it was his hobby and I remember the quality time I used to spend in his studio as a child. White, purity and innocence. Landscape, an old home at 20m km from Marrakech where I had very strong memories. 
How and when did you first approach art? 
Lalla: As mentioned above, since I was a child, I started drawing and painting in my father’s studio.  I have always liked to draw and paint, but it is only in 2000 that I took it to a professional level after I graduated from School of the Museum of Fine Art/Tufts University.

Do you feel the countries you lived in influenced your aesthetics? The conceptuality of your work?
Lalla: Definitely! My experiences and the cultures I explored, lived, shaped the person I am today. Living in different countries with their different costumes and traditions helped me develop my own sense of seeing things differently then if I had to live in one place. It gave me the opportunity to compare and contrast elements, which I wouldn’t have had if I stayed in one given place.  So that experience made me aware of the multiple roles we can play if only we are given the responsibilities and the opportunity. 
In a sentence how would you like to convey your art?
Lalla: My work crosses cultural boundaries, invokes art history, is at once personal and political, domestic and social. It reaches back to myths, unburdens stereotypes, upsets our thinking about gender, hierarchies and power, and traditions that limit as well as preserve. It's about the past —colonialism and independence
Is art a bridge between different worlds? Is it a personal take born from identity?
Lalla: My work is highly autobiographical.  In it, I speak my thoughts and talk directly about my experiences as a woman and an artist, finding the language with which to speak from those uncertain zones between memory and the present, East and West. As an Arab artist, living in the West, I have been granted an extraordinary perspective from which to observe both cultures, and I have also been imprinted by these cultures.  In a sense, I feel I inhabit (and perhaps even embody) a ‘crossroads,” where the cultures come together -- merge, interweave, and sometimes, clash.  As an artist, I inhabit not only a geo-cultural terrain, but also an imaginative one.  This space continues to define itself, to unfold and evolve, and as an artist, I feel it is my job  (and my passion) to try and understand it, and to make work that flows from this continuing investigation.

Are women the central focus of your work? How do you feel about your own femininity? How were you able to express it and understand it thanks to the different places you experienced?
Lalla: My work is about women, by women, toward women, of women. And it's about confinement and freedom, constraint and control; about beauty and objectification; about the surface and what's lying below, the spaces within, between, and without. It's subversive and provocative; sensual and ritualistic.
Can you tell us about your next exhibit?
Lalla: I do have few exhibitions coming; the most recent opened at Edwynn Houk gallery March 10, 2001 and will be up until April 30th, in Zurich, Switzerland. Now I am preparing for my National exhibit at Bab Rouah National Moroccan gallery in Rabat, April 1st till April 30th. This exhibit will travel to five different Moroccan cities, Fes, National Museum, Meknes National gallery, Tangier, National Museum then Meknes National Museum.  I am very excited and proud of course to be invited by the Minister of culture of Morocco to have this very important exhibit.  It is a coming back I was dreaming about since the beginning of my career.
Is Islam a starting point of exploration?
Lalla: My work is not about religion at all. Islam is my religion and I have no problem with my beliefs.  I am more concerned about the social and cultural issues.  Though that most of the time they all go hand on hand, but it is important that we make the difference between religion and the interpretation of religion and the use of it for different ends. 

Religion? Geography? How according to you these two elements influence an artistic evolution?
Lalla: I believe that everything can and should influence artistic evolution; it is the interpretation of the history/politics/culture/religion of any given area by its artists.  And with all the changes happening in our part of the world at present, I feel that I am much more connected with people and with countries.  

Interview by Acelya Yonac

The Invitation to the Exhibit:

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