The first encounter with Lalla Essaydi’s compositions cannot leave you indifferent. Because they are compositions beyond photography. If the female representation has become a constant among female artists around the Mediterranean and the Middle-East, Lalla Essaydi’s approach, while very contemporary and conceptual, consists in the staging of eternal themes - digging Moroccan cultural heritage (calligraphy and henna) and reinterpreting the conventions of the Orientalist art movement. Each work is of great beauty, of great soberness – timeless scenes that place us before the beauty, substance, pride and strength of women. In a sort of other world with its swirls, volumes and perspectives; a concern for detail and line - totally Oriental. Each work is also full of places and moments; between Morocco and the United States, Lalla Essaydi also shares her memories and her migrations. Her works question us. They send us back to our vision of the oriental woman, and beyond to our image of women. They question our historic perception of the East and challenge our clichés. They doubtlessly find their full meaning when they travel across the United States and beyond the seas to our Middle-Eastern lands… Interview.

When and why did you create the Converging Territories and The Women of Morocco series? Do they convey some autobiographical elements?

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. The models I use are often women who have had the same relation to the physical spaces as I have.  But we also work with younger women so that the setting becomes a platform for the creation of new memories and understandings.

My more recent photographic series, Les Femmes du Maroc (The Women of Morocco), is set in my studio in Boston, where I work with Moroccan women who are, like me, residents of the West, but profoundly marked by our experience in our original culture. Women of the Diaspora, a place of separation and displacement, we have chosen to engage with traditional Arab and Islamic art, as part of a renegotiation of identity. Present too, in these photographs, is a continuous dialogue with Western art, most notably Orientalist painting. The series attempts to register at a place of converging difference: between East and West, absence and presence, nearness and distance, and to renegotiate identities through loss of place and new encounters.
The Converging Territories series is set in Morocco, in a large house, no longer occupied, that belongs to my family. Until fairly recently, I returned here for my photographic work. I wanted to set my work in the physical space where, in the house of my childhood, a young woman was sent when she disobeyed, stepped outside the permissible behavioral space, as defined by my culture. Here, accompanied only by servants, she would spend a month, spoken to by no one, a month of silence. So this literal space is also a psychological one, a space marked by memory, and an embodiment as well of cultural boundaries, a cultural space. (…) The women in my photographs are both held within an actual space, and at the same time are confined to their “proper place”, a place of walls and boundaries. These women have become literal odalisques (“odalisque”, from the Turkish, means “belonging to a place”). One has only to look at the continuity between the henna on their bodies and the patterns of the surrounding tiles to see how they have become identified with their surroundings.

But there is yet another kind of space that figures in Converging Territories. For after having revisited this house many times in making these photographs, and thinking about my own complex relation as an artist to this space of childhood, I have become aware of another space, one less tangible and more ambiguous, that of the imagination, of self-creation.

Your photographs translate an extraordinary density. Can you tell us about their long and difficult creation process ?

The preparations for the photo shoot start up to six months in advance, when we commence writing on the fabric that covers the walls, the furniture, and the women’s clothing. Much of this writing I do myself, although for Converging Territories, two women helped me inscribe the walls, while I did all the writing on the models and their clothing. For Les Femmes du Maroc, which is set in Boston, all the writing was done by me. It takes more than six months to prepare enough fabric, for once the henna has dried, it flecks off easily, so that some rewriting is required during the shoot, each time the women move.

Creating the photographs is in many ways performative and this process is crucially reflected in the finished work. I use family acquaintances as models, and take great pains to acquaint them fully with the thinking behind the work and their roles in it. I consider them partners in the creation of these photographs. Then, applying henna is a very painstaking process, and cannot be interrupted, so the models are unable to rest, sometimes for as long as nine hours! I do everything I can to make this process easy on them. In fact, I create a whole atmosphere around them. I provide them with food and drink, we play music, and tell stories, and each shoot is preceded by a day of rehearsing so they know exactly what to expect.

So as you can see, my work is very process-oriented. I believe the time I spend making the work is the defining aspect of being an artist. The process of making generates new perceptions and facilitates personal transformation, which in turn may yield new forms of expression. The arc of the entire process, from start to finish, is very liberating...

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Helene Poirier (Jan-Feb09 Issue)

Gallery Images: Courtesy of Waterhouse & Dodd, London, UK - For more info log onto www.artroutes.com or contact +44 (0) 20 7734 7800