With Karmit Even-Zur
in collaboration with
Culture Vultures
dates to be confirmed
Register your interest
here
THE POETICS OF CRAFT SEFROU, MOROCCO
‘In any creative work, be it the artist or the artisan, the creative person unites with the material they are working with, which symbolises the world outside him/herself. The worker and the artefact become one. The human being becomes one with his creation. ‘ Erich Fromm
The word Poiein in Ancient Greek (ποιεῖν) means making. It is where the word Poetry comes from. Plato had pointed at the connection between craft-making and poetry, calling us to gaze at the rich worlds of form and meaning that come to life when we take raw material from our landscape and create with it. It is possible, when we look at a handcrafted object, to appreciate the emotion and soul life that the maker had infused in it.
Praxis Mundi
A collaborative psycho-magical act of healing and
metaphoric redistribution of power along the 0º Meridian
Jane Glenzinska & Karmit Evenzur
Praxis Mundi
A collaborative psycho-magical act of healing and
metaphoric redistribution of power along the 0º Meridian
Jane Glenzinska & Karmit Evenzur
Praxis Mundi
A collaborative psycho-magical act of healing and
metaphoric redistribution of power along the 0º Meridian
Jane Glenzinska & Karmit Evenzur
Sefrou is located in the heart of the middle Atlas. Traditionally, a market town located amidst fertile farming lands, it is known for its fruit orchards, cherry festival and the large Jewish community that lived there up until the last century. Sefrou is still home to a large community of local artisans, metal smiths, woodworkers, weavers and button makers. Though the community is still thriving, few are the ones of the young generation who wish to learn these skills.
Visiting local crafts people in their workshops, we will learn about their work and daily lives as a way to get a sense of the place through the people and their working spaces. An orientation of the city from the inside out hosted by Culture Vultures, will lead us into a deeper relationship with Amazigh women who spin and weave and we will participate in a hands own textile workshop.
We will be introduced to ‘The Loom in Local Rituals’ and how women used the loom as a sacred medium for protection. On Sunday we will make a day trip to a mountain market town in the Middle Atlas where the wool comes from, to meet women who practice unbroken textile traditions in the region.
Alongside these visits our work will consist of listening to the stories that emerge from our activities, as well as engage with traditional stories from around the world to bring into clearer focus the role of craft-making in the life of the Soul. On our last day we will share these stories in a storytelling evening (no previous experience necessary). Daily shamanic practices will help us access ancestral knowledge and seek healing for modern day’s rupture between skill and community, craft and Time.
Karmit Even Zur
EARTH SPEAKS
Anteus
Ritual storytelling for decolonising ancient narratives
They say Anteus was thirty meters tall.
A giant.
They say his father was the great Sea god and his mother the Earth.
His lover was Tingis and with her he gave life to two daughters.
They say that any travellers who passed through his land were forced to compete with him in a wrestling match. And all of those, he killed and out of all the human skulls he axed, he built a temple for his father. A most magnificent temple, resounding the human folly of empty heads stacked one on top of another in Poseidon’s great hall. No one was stronger than Anteus, and the skulls mounted higher and higher.
It was his mother, the earth, who kept him strong. Her throbbing magnetism pulsed through her son’s veins as long as he kept in intimate contact with her.
But one day, they say, a great hero came. A man of flesh and bones, a man whose will was like an arrow, who knew the secret of Anti’s Strength and in treachery he overcame the invincible giant. Anteus is dead.
We find the myth of the wrestling match between Anteus (Anti) the giant and Greek hero Heracles at the meeting point of the Amazigh and the Hellenic cultures, back in the days of the Greek expansion into Western Africa in the 5th century BC. It came to represent the Hellenic colonisation of ‘Lybia’/North Africa in Greek as well as Amazigh mythology.
Heracles takes away the power of Anti by separating him from the ground, knowing that Anti's mother, Gaia is the source of his potent life-force. We find at the base of every colonial endeavour, a process of intentionally separating people from the land, from their source of belonging and power.
This installation and ritual performance for decolonising ancient narratives seeks to re-code the myth, reconnecting the giant again with a maternal underground, magnetic, serpentine energy. As we open our minds to occult topographies of M’zora stone circle, we may imagine the being of Anti as the surface expression of the earth’s underground lithic consciousness. We tell his story backwards, weaving in other mythical characters from the area who give their assistance in pulling the giant back down to touch his mother's body.
This work is made in conjunction with the M'zora stone circle, and is told to anyone who wants to hear the story. Contact me to book a telling.
Ritual Performance, in collaboration with Aziz Amrani
Still from video by Outman Akjeje
Ritual Performance, in collaboration with Aziz Amrani