Social media help the last woman potter of Morocco

Mama Aicha very rarely sells beautiful hand-made pottery in Morocco, but thanks to social media, her ancestral techniques attract students from all over the world to the foothills of the Rif Mountains.

"When I heard about the workshop on Instagram, I signed up immediately because the practice is disappearing," said Mirna Banieh, a young artist who went to Morocco from the city of Ramallah in the West Bank.

"Mama Aicha is old and her knowledge needs to be pbaded on," she added.

The four students from Banieh are sitting on the mats, legs crossed, hands covered with clay learning knowledge of the 82-year-old potter.

They came from London and Nairobi in an isolated hamlet at the end of a rocky trail for a one week initiation.

Their goal is to learn how to hand-shape pieces of clay, to dry them in the sun, to light them in a large open pit filled with wood and to polish them with stone beforehand. decorate them with natural pigments.

Like everywhere in the Rif Mountains, the female potters of the Sless tribe, to which belongs the family of Aicha Tabiz, disappear.

The tribe had about 90 potters in the late 1990s. Now, there are only half a dozen of them left.

"Young people here do not want to get their hands dirty with clay.They dream of being officials with fixed wages," said the grandmother, everyone affectionately calls Mama Aicha.

The ancestral knowledge which, according to some experts, dates back to the Bronze Age, is gradually being lost due to the decline of the market.

Go plastic

"When I was young, everyone used earthen pots and bowls everyday and my mother sold them at the market, but today everyone prefers plastic," said Mohamed Tabiz, the eldest son of Aicha.

Researchers, collectors and enthusiasts are among the many who have warned for decades of the disappearance of this craft handed down from generation to generation.

"We wanted to establish a museum in the village," said Tabiz, but "local authorities were not interested".

The German anthropologist Rudiger Vossen, the most erudite among those who drew attention to the decline of tradition, traveled across Morocco in the 1980s and 1990s to catalog the techniques and designs used by each tribe .

Volunteers from the "Women's Land" badociation went to the Rif for years, collecting pottery from isolated farms and selling it to tourists in a small shop in the capital Rabat.

But the most famous is undoubtedly the artistic director of Dior, the Italian Maria Grazia Chiuri, who recently put the potters of the Rif in the spotlight during a fashion show in Marrakech.

But it is thanks to Instagram that Mama Aicha's work has gained a worldwide reputation.

"The potters use it a lot, everyone publishes pictures of their pieces (and) exchange tips and advice," said Kim West, a 33-year-old British workshop participant.

Thanks to this worldwide word of mouth promotion, the workshops announced on the website of a new badociation, Sumano, have been a resounding success.

"All positions were filled two days after registration, we had a waiting list with candidates from around the world," said Martha Valdeon, 42, co-founder of Sumano, from Spain.

Founded last year, Sumano promotes the craft of women of Moroccan tribes.

New designs

Mom Aicha patiently guides her students in the workshop installed near the family farm.

Wall-mounted papers list useful words in the local dialect – terms for pottery and tools, common phrases such as "Can you help me?" and "what do you think of that?"

The master potter teaches mainly with the help of gestures. Like the majority of women from remote areas of Morocco, she has dedicated her life to her fields, livestock and children.

At age 27, Houda Oumal, from the neighboring tribe of M & # 39; tioua, is one of the few people who wants to "follow in her mother's footsteps".

She lives with her parents on the top of a mountain in the middle of the cannabis fields which constitute, quite illegally, the Rif's main source of income. She started casting clay at the age of seven, but she neither reads nor writes. There are five mosques in the community, but not one school.

"This job allows us to make a good living, we have to share our expertise so that it becomes profitable," she said with a shy smile.

Recently, the young woman started signing her creations with her initials, adding more graphic designs and new forms to "diversify her work and stand out".

"For us, these works are works of art, they have real value," said Valdeon.

The Sumano Association places orders for the potters, buys the works, transports them to Spain and sells them 20 times the local price on its website, promising to redistribute the income locally "when the activity becomes profitable" .