Crafting Luxury with ‘More-ish’ Qualities at the YSL Museum: An Organic Approach (original) (raw)
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Form and materiality in contemporary Southern Moroccan architecture
Vernacular Architecture: Towards a Sustainable Future, 2014
The cultural landscape of the pre-Saharan regions of Southern Morocco presents a strong contrast between lifestyles that have preserved identity relationships with traditional habitat and new settlement patterns influenced by globalization. These realities are conditioned by two phenomena: the presence during summer of Moroccan emigrants from Europe and the visit of tourists that search an encounter with an exotic traditional world. Both have an impact in the form and materiality of the contemporary architecture of the region. The question is if the encounter between traditional culture and the new constructive needs brought by the touristic sector will preserve identity relationships linked to tradition, and how these identities may be protected and preserved.
2019
This research stems from a theoretical study of the Medina of Tunis, as a continuity of the author's doctoral research. The broader study from which the concepts are drawn is part of a PhD project, in architecture and humanities, focused on the effects of globalization on the Medina of Tunis. Studies and publications of the houses of the Medina of Tunis are lacking from the literature, in the Anglo-Saxon world, thus the interest of the author is to build a new body of knowledge examining historical restoration projects in Tunisia. This research article traces the challenges faced by the Medina of Tunis in the twenty-first century. It does so by evaluating a restoration and conversion project of seventeenth century Dar Ben-Gacem into a boutique hotel or 'Hotel de Charme'. The project is unique as it reflects an architectural and entrepreneurial initiative of its owners aiming to work alongside the Medina's small businesses, local artisans and the community at large. In this context, this research examines the architectural and socio-cultural challenges faced by the owners as well as the architects to preserve the identity of the building while diversifying the use of its spaces. This study first examines the history of Dar Ben-Gacem and the transition of the traditional courtyard house into a 'cosmopolitan' guest house that attracts visitors and tourists from all cultures and nationalities. Later, it explores the motivations and commitments of the owners to revive tangible and intangible artefacts through architecture as well as the social and cultural entrepreneurship of Tunisia's rich cultural history. Ultimately, this theoretical study evaluates the challenges faced in such projects to revive the cultural heritage of the house while shaping a 'story' of a generation. Restoration projects in the Medina vary in scale and purpose. The consideration of both tangible and intangible artefacts in this historical context is highly important as it delves into the question of heritage in the age of tourism and globalization.
Sun, air, water and soil are in most of the clothes we wear. In the era of ecological crisis, this international conference aims to investigate the new paradigms of fashion cultures through the four archetypal elements of matter. By doing so, it shifts the attention towards the material and sensory aspects of fashion, features that have been largely neglected by fashion studies over the past forty years. This approach fits in the current debate on the 'material turn' inspired by de-centering the human and re-centering matter and the materiality of things, objects, technologies, and bodies. The conference proposes to analyse this ontological shift through the redefinition of the substance of fashion and its history. In Western and non-Western cultures matter is conceived as a coexistence of multiple elements following a tradition that includes, among others, the cosmological treatise of Aristotle, the Hinduist and Buddhist meditations on the 'primary material elements' (mahabhutas), and Jābir ibn Hayyān's alchemy. The conference takes place in Venice, a city that emerged from water through a process of significant anthropisation, and in which life's rhythms and movements historically coexist and are dependent on a critically changing environment.
Mediating Museums: Exhibiting Material Culture in Tunisia (1881-2016), Virginie Rey (2019)
International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 2022
Virginie Rey argues that Tunisian ethnographic museums serve as sites of national empowerment and function as mediators of society's changes, tensions, and contradictions. This mediation is the ethnographic museum's 'built-in disposition' (3) and remains at work even when curators and heritage workers do not actively seek it out. Ethnographic museums in Tunisia are not only important because they house examples of the nation's material culture, but because they make up nearly half of the country's museums. Rey's case studies are gateways to understanding Tunisia's social and political worlds during the historical period she considers. The museums she examines function as 'witnesses' of a 'unique national culture' and 'arenas' wherein the 'national front' is displayed (11). Mediating Museums is divided into four chronological parts and eleven concise chapters with a historical parameter that begins in 1881, with the start of the French protectorate, to the contemporary period marked most recently by the 2011 revolution. Rey examines the continuity of trends and debates surrounding Tunisian ethnographic museums across time and space, and demonstrates how socio-political shifts both alter museums and are reflected by them. In Part 1, titled 'Mapping Tunisian Material Culture (1881-1956)', Rey notes that museums were first introduced to Tunisia by the French in the middle of the nineteenth century. By the mid-1930s, museums of indigenous arts served alongside professional schools specializing in the teaching of arts and crafts to map culture and teach 'authentic' aesthetics to artisans. These efforts, along with the promotion of a 'neo-mauresque' style that Rey defines as the entwining of local aesthetics and European expertise, was a manifestation of France's associationist cultural policy, demonstrated that visual culture was used as a tool to serve the imperial project (32, 34). Mediating Museums offers readers a new perspective on Tunisia's material culture by discussing its place within the larger colonial project, which continues to be a major blind spot in scholarship that has traditionally whitewashed the role of arts and crafts in the service of empire. European investment in local craft was a form of control over and exploitation of the indigenous workforce and served as a means for financial gain. More importantly, Rey politicizes protectorate-era museums as 'laboratories of modernity', thereby demonstrating how they are interconnected with colonial ideals of progress and modernity (36). On the one hand, the French revival of artisanship in Copyright of International Journal of Islamic Architecture is the property of Intellect Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Defining Moroccanness: The Aesthetics and Politics of Contemporary Moroccan Fashion Design
2015
At the turn of the twenty-first century, a new generation of Moroccan fashion designers has started to emerge that can be distinguished from their predecessors by a radical style break. These designers no longer adhere to the idea that Moroccan fashion should be limited to a characteristic set of garments and/or decorations representing Arab-Muslim identity, but aspire an artistic freedom to conceptualise and define Moroccan fashion in an innovative, distinct and critical way. They are turning to Morocco’s cultural diversity for inspiration, represented in popular culture, street styles, rural cultural heritage as well as the country’s heterogeneous cultural past, including its African origins. This new generation, however, finds itself widely accused of ‘not being Moroccan’ by Moroccan consumers. I argue that this is due to the hegemonic construction of Moroccan national identity based on Arab-Muslim cultural heritage, dating back to the nationalist movement during the French Protectorate. What qualifies as Moroccan fashion – and especially as opposed to European fashion – in contemporary Moroccan urban society is complex and represents political, cultural and social power struggles. This style change initiated by contemporary designers not only reflects a general desire for more individual rights in relation to religious and cultural identity, but also a direct critique of the sociocultural domination of the elite. This article aims to analyse the aesthetics and politics of contemporary Moroccan fashion design and its artistic ambitions, as a way to challenge prevailing ideas of Moroccanness imposed by the ruling elite.
Defining Moroccanness: Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary Moroccan Fashion Design
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a new generation of Moroccan fashion designers has started to emerge which clearly distinguishes itself through a radical style break. They no longer adhere to the idea that Moroccan fashion should be defined by stereotypes of Moroccan cultural heritage and therefore limited to the characteristic local garments such as the qaftan, jellaba, gandura, selham or marked by typical local crafts such as distinctive embroideries, couched plaited cord, braided bands and needle lace. Instead, they aspire an artistic freedom to question, criticise, define and conceptualize Moroccanness in their designs in an abstract and theoretical manner. However, this generation finds itself widely accused of ‘not being Moroccan’ and their annual platform, the Casablanca Fashion Week, has a hard time securing public funding. As part of an Orientalist heritage, Moroccan artists have been incorporating components of their cultural heritage into their work in order to justify its ‘Moroccanness’ towards a western audience. But over time, these ‘stereotypes’ of Moroccan cultural identity have been internalized, resulting in processes of self-Orientalism in the construction of national identity. Contrary to Orientalism, self-Orientalism exploits the Orientalist gaze to turn oneself into the Other and to create, maintain and strengthen an own national cultural identity. Morocco’s political powers, in their turn, have been actively using so-called traditional Moroccan fashion to stimulate the consumption of a culturally marketed self to create a sense of belonging, further national interests, stimulate international tourism, influence foreign investments and as a tool for public diplomacy. Therefore, the artistic produce of this new generation is considered a thread to national identity and therefore to national unity. This paper explores the tensions Moroccan fashion designers are dealing with between their avant-gardist artistic ambitions to challenge ideas of Moroccanness and political power based on (national) traditionalism, between artistic aspirations to transcend national borders and the public’s longing for cultural anchorage and (national) authenticity in a rapidly globalizing and industrializing postmodern world.
Shangri La Working Papers in Islamic Art, 2014
After a weeklong stay in the French Protectorate of Morocco in 1937, Doris Duke and James Cromwell hired René Martin, owner of the Rabat-based firm S.A.L.A.M., to design and produce a series of interior spaces inspired by Moroccan architecture and design for their Honolulu villa, Shangri La. In collaboration with Martin and his associates, the Cromwells engaged local craft workshops in Morocco to construct custom-made furnishings and architectural features, including carved and painted cedar ceilings, zellij tilework, and other elements in wood, plaster, metal, and ceramic. The couple’s encounter with Moroccan art coincided with a rich moment in the modern history of Morocco’s craft industries. From its establishment in 1912, the French Protectorate administration had launched an extensive campaign to “revitalize” Morocco’s “traditional” arts, and by the late 1930s a vibrant commercial market for Moroccan artistic and cultural products spanned from Morocco to France and beyond. This paper reconsiders Duke’s own participation in the “revitalization” of so-called “living craft traditions” in this historical context.
The Power of Fashion: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Moroccan Society
16th IFFTI Annual Conference 2014 Title : The Power of Fashion: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Moroccan Society Subtheme : The Cultural Aspects of Fashion Keywords : Morocco, fashion, globalization, tradition, modernity Note : This paper was awarded the Junior Faculty IFFTI Initiatives Award Although there have been fears that globalization would lead to global cultural homogeneity based on especially a Western model, social scientists have contested this, insisting that receivers of cultural flows are not passive agents but that cultural materials always entail local interpretation, translation and customization on the part of the receiving subject. A good example is the introduction of Western fashion on a large scale in Morocco, which did not threaten the continuity of Moroccan fashion, but on the contrary, accelerated its development mainly by introducing new consumption and commercialization patterns that are applied to Moroccan fashion. Because Moroccan and Western fashion have different values, meet different needs and therefore represent different markets, they do not compete with one other. The power of fashion lays in the fact that it allows people to negotiate concepts of continuity and change, tradition and modernity and local and global. Western fashion brands have, first of all, contributed to an important extent to the democratization of fashion in Morocco by making fashion trends accessible to a wider range of social classes through fashion boutiques and advertisement. Secondly, they have contributed to the commodification of Moroccan fashion, resulting in a switch from a craft to an industry, consumption based on demand to consumption based on offer, the commercialization of traditional occasions like Ramadan and the wedding season and the development of new markets for Moroccan fashion. Thirdly, by introducing strategies of branding, marketing, customer services, seasonal fashion, etc., a shift occurred in Morocco from anonymous workshops of ‘traditional’ tailors to ‘modern’ designers’ boutiques associated with luxury and glamour and insinuating services that Moroccan consumers have grown accustomed to through their shopping for Western fashion. But most of all, under the influence of Western fashion, ‘traditional’ Moroccan fashion is believed to have ‘modernized.’ This paper argues that concepts of tradition and modernity are not static nor mutually exclusive and it uses the case study of the Moroccan fashion industry to illustrate this. While Moroccan fashion is the materialization of important social, cultural, political and religious changes in contemporary Moroccan urban society, the other way around, fashion offers a powerful tool to negotiate between local realities and foreign influences. Where tradition provides people with cultural anchorage, modernity represents an alternative to some repressive mechanisms of these very same traditions. As this case-study shows, the growing impact of foreign cultural influences as a result of globalization do not threaten local culture, but on the contrary, lead to a re-evaluation of national identity based on local cultural heritage.
Fashion Inspired by Architecture: The Interrelationship between Mashrabiya and Fashion World
Journal of History Culture and Art Research
The relationship between architecture and fashion fields have received many studies. Some researches have considered them as parallel worlds, while others have proven that the link is an interrelationship. Generally, architecture and fashion have many common sources: art, science, and technology. This makes them sometimes close worlds, and in many other cases, they are mixed. However, it is wise to assume that the best situation when one field becomes a source to another, and they support each other within a logical visible relationship. Architecture gives inspiration to fashion, per contra fashion achieves notability for an architectural figure or element. Mashrabiya (The traditional Arab oriel window that works as an environmental architectural element) has entered into fashion field through one of the new approaches of the heritage restoration movement. This approach has presented unique fashion shows and unparalleled jewellery designs, while made Mashrabiya a popular name in non-architectural surroundings. While the environmental functions of Mashrabiya are used in many contemporary projects without acknowledging its original name "Mashrabiya". Moreover, other projects dealt with it using a new name like 'geometric panels', fashion has maintained the authenticity of the name and its orientalism. This article tries to show that Mashrabiya is one of the architectural element which gives inspiration to the fashion world. The article also presents examples of fashion and jewellery design inspired from the Mashrabiya element.