Between the decline in demand due to competition from cheap industrial products, the loss of traditional skills due to the lack of training and transmission between generations, the art of Moroccan embroidery in its technicality and diversity is in danger.
In 2022, a project agreement for the safeguarding and transmission of artisanal heritage was signed between Morocco and UNESCO. This programme provides for a sustainable system for the transfer of skills and the transmission of know-how related to craft trades threatened with extinction. This framework must support those who have been fighting for years to reactivate this know-how, like the textile designer Fatima Lévèque.
With: > Fatima Lévèque, co-curator of the exhibition Tarz. Broder in Morocco, yesterday and today, artist textile designer. Her work focuses on textiles in Berber and Arab-Muslim culture and local social development and solidarity internationally. > Myriem Naji, researcher in the Department of Anthropology at UCL (University College London), where she defended her thesis in 2008. She is interested in the processes of production and creation and the transmission of knowledge in general. In particular, it examines the impact of the market and local revitalization initiatives on producing populations. In 2011, she organized an exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, entitled "Weaving the threads of livelihood: the aesthetic and embodied knowledge of Amazigh/Berber weavers" (Weaving the threads of subsistence: the aesthetic and embodied knowledge of Amazigh/ Berber weavers). One of her current projects, for which she received a scholarship from the British Museum, aims to study textile knowledge and practices in Morocco.