The idea of weaving an artwork from palm husks came to Amina Agueznay during a workshop she was leading in Morocco’s Souss-Massa region, as part of a project with local rug weavers to renovate Tissekmoudine, a ksar, or fortified village.
“The plan was to integrate the palm trees from the oasis in our designs, so I encouraged the women to look around them and use whatever material they could find,” says Agueznay, who this month won the Norval Sovereign African art prize, worth $35,000 (£28,000).
“We decided to weave with what, in the Berber language, the women call talefdamt [palm husk],” Agueznay recalls. “We deconstructed it to create a thread that we could use.”
The winning work, Portal #1, is reminiscent of a jagged-edge motif found on Moroccan rugs and inspired by the symbols painted on the doors of a ksar.
The architect turned artist, who is known for collaborating with rural craftworkers and documenting their designs and traditions, says she feels “blessed” by the win.
“This prize is an encouragement and the will to continue, empowering women that I work with. I lead workshops throughout Morocco and what happens is that I always go back. There is a continuity, and continuity is very important to me – what we call la pérennité [sustainability].
“I would call it a constellation,” says Agueznay. “It’s like building another family.”
Born in 1963, she is the daughter of Malika Agueznay, who is among Morocco’s first female modernist abstract artists and a member of the celebrated Casablanca Art School.
Moving to the US for 15 years after school, Agueznay studied architecture in Washington and practised there and in New York before returning to Morocco in 1997. She started working on smaller-scale projects, such as jewellery, before expanding to large art installations.
“I returned to Morocco to explore scale in a meaningful way,” Agueznay says. “I can’t hug my buildings, but I can hug my artwork.”
Ksars, fortified villages found across the Maghreb, are made of stone and adobe with palm grove gardens. Some are ruined, but many are being renovated as part of a national push to preserve Morocco’s cultural heritage.
Agueznay was invited to get involved with local people in the project to renovate the Tissekmoudine ksar by the architect and anthropologist Salima Naji, who works on using traditional materials and techniques in such renovations.
Agueznay says she drew a door and asked six women to weave for her. “It’s all a performative process,” she says. “It’s like choreography or ballet for me.”
“It’s about the intangible and the tangible. The piece is tactile – you want to touch it, you want to smell it,” she says.
“It has the smell of the oasis, the palm husk. The tangible is the oeuvre, the final piece that you have in front of you, and yet the stories and the process remain intangible.”
A total of 375 works by 160 artists were entered for this year’s prize, organised in South Africa by the Norval Foundation and the Sovereign Art Foundation (SAF). The 27 finalists come from 17 countries, including South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal.
Ashraf Jamal, a Cape Town-based academic who was one of the judges, said they had chosen “an artist with an enduring vision of the lives and triumphs of women of the African desert”.
Agueznay, who is represented by the Loft Art Gallery in Casablanca and Marrakech, had an artistic residency at Fondation H in Madagascar last year, where she was inspired by the Malagasy artist Madame Zo, who was celebrated for her textile artworks.
“Weaving is interesting because it’s about going back to the line,” she says. “The line is important for me because of my practice as an architect – I always go back to my architectural primary elements of form: lines, planes and volumes.”
Agueznay says she thinks what comes out of Africa artistically is “always surprising”.
“It’s always new,” she says, “and for a curious person like me that’s what makes the magic.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
