Safi – Soumiya Jalal is back at the Villa des Arts. Twenty-two years after her first major show there, the artist opened “De fil en mémoire: 2004-2026” on June 23.
The retrospective pulls together more than 25 years of her work alongside new pieces made for this presentation. Fondation Al Mada and Art First Galerie put it together, describing it as a tribute to more than two decades of her research into thread, memory, and place.
Trained as an architect, Jalal first worked in urban planning, where her eye for pattern and texture took hold. She later enrolled in a textile arts program in Montreal to formalize her weaving practice.
She built her own practice starting in 1999 and began teaching it two years later, going on to train the next generation of Moroccan weavers.
Her installations bring textile fibers together with mineral, plant, and recycled materials. She breaks from the tight vertical stripes of traditional Moroccan weaving, leaning instead into asymmetry and irregular shapes.
Her work also plays contrast against contrast: matte against shiny, loose against tight, opaque against transparent. She traces that balance back to her own Moroccan heritage and a childhood spent on the coast.
In this show, that history folds into a palette that stays almost entirely white. The monochrome pieces draw on Casablanca’s own light and coastline, the same coastal pull that has shaped her work from the start.
