Djunta Mo

By Sumesh Sharma

In Cape Verdean Portuguese 'Djunta Mo' refers to the communal act of 'joining hands and coming together - a sense of communal work ethic through which Cape Verdean immigrants built their lives in exile as immigrants in the United States or Europe. Rachid Koraïchi has lived in France since the late 1960s where he studied at the Écoles des Arts Décoratifs and later studied Urbanism. At the art School in Algiers, Koraïchi was keen to study technique and thus the rigorous curriculum at the school of decorative arts in Paris allowed him to hone skills as he was keen to develop. He had been attracted to the idea of an atelier - a place where many craftsmen worked with precise technical excellence to produce work.  In an atelier as well among immigrant communities the idea of ‘Djunta Mo’ is universally understood. Holding a complex practice of complex collaboration across medium, materiality, form and subject Koraïchi is emblematic of the phrase.

Rachid Koraïchi returns with an exhibition that holds applique banners, ceramics and lithographs to Aicon New York this April, 2025. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art when you encounter the Islamic Art Department you see the idea of the studio ever present whether the display has objects of calligraphy, woodwork, jewellery or textile. Islamic Art has an esoteric imaginary where the labour put into the making of an object has a spiritual dimension. Rather than recreating life through figuration of human form the purpose of art within the realm of the Islamic world is to congratulate and remember God for the magnificence of life.  Dhikr in Islam is a continuous remembering and repetition of God's names, phrases and praises as a reminder of one's spiritual duties and forms the essence of Sufi practice. Thus when it comes to weaving a silk carpet in Kashmir, carving walnut wood partitions in Persia or to making bronze lanterns in Morocco the repetitive act of weaving, carving and painting is seen as replicative of the act of Dhikr. The object then holds an esoteric blessing and charm.

Rachid Koraïchi traces his origins to the Quraysh tribe of Mecca amongst whom the Prophet Mohammed was born. After the establishment of Islam the tribe spread across a vast geography that extended from the Atlantic coast in Senegal, the Mediterranean Coast at Kairouan in Tunisia to the Caucasus mountains and onto the eastern edge around the Bay of Bengal. They came as scholars, traders, medicants and saints of various Sufi orders. Koraïchi born in 1947 comes from a family of scholars and members of a Sufi order, he came of adult age just as Algeria became independent at a moment where the impetus to overthrow the yoke of colonialism was in all fury. A yoke of western aesthetics held heavy on the curriculum of the art school in Algiers though Koraïchi trained well under the French professors who had stayed back after independence. How would he as an artist revisit his rich lineage and address the political urgencies of a young man practicing art in Paris? Paris - a city that in the 1960s straddled the role of being at the centre of colonial power and the capital of the art world.

The Maghreb region situated just across from the Mediterranean has had many intersections with Latin Europe. Civilisational linkages since the times of the Phoenicians and the Greco-Roman Empire have been existent since the earliest records of history. The Greco-Roman ruins across this coast form part of the Roman province of Africa through which the continent gets its name.  The coast of North Africa was known as the Barbary Coast to the Romans. With the advent of Islam and the fall of the Andalusian empire Arabic replaced Amazigh languages but the shared heritage of Ceramics and architecture from southern Europe was only enriched with artisanal practices that arrived in the region from Damascus, Cairo and Turkey.  The French word 'Berber' for the Amazigh people has its origins in this term. Even as the Renaissance was enlightening Italy prejudices against those who were enriching Italy through trade from across the sea persisted as they were perceived as alien cultures of uncivilised and fearsome barbarians.  But a deep syncretism of visual cultures developed in these lands in the centuries before the advent of colonialism.

Koraïchi revisits the route his ancestors took to reach Algeria as a chart to decide the materiality, techniques and visual vocabulary of his diverse practice. Starting with Cairo, the magnificent city of palaces and mosques established by the Fatimids is where he began retracing the journey. At the wooden roofed market - the Qasaba of Radwan Bey where under the softly latticed mashrabiya balconies are the shops of the tentmakers.  The tentmakers of Cairo exist as a continuous tradition of craft that use a technique of applique where delicate white cotton cloth is placed over a tougher layer of dark blue cotton canvas and are hand woven together. Egypt was the first land of wonder that established the present tourist trade and it is here where Thomas Cook invented the profession of the travel agent and the leisure activity of the foreign tour. Tourists in the 19th century would swarm Cairo to see the pyramids of Giza and the country's Pharaonic past after being intrigued by the objects brought back to European museums through the archaeological discoveries of the mummies as well as the deciphering of the Egyptian Alphabet found on the Rosetta stone.  The tentmakers began copying Egyptian frescoes onto wall hangings as souvenirs for tourists thus preserving the craft.

Rachid Koraïchi began reconnecting with the tent makers through their common belonging to the Tijjaniya Sufi order. Before the tourist boom the tentmakers made tents and banners for the Royal Ottoman Khedives who ruled Egypt. The banners served as royal standards and as hangings that had prayers such as the Ayat Ul-Kursi and Surah Al -Baqarah inscribed through applique using the square geometric Kufic script. After Cairo the tribe of the Quraysh first settled in the city of Kairouan in Tunisia which is home to one of the oldest Mosques outside the Arabian peninsula. Here they developed a unique Kufic script called the Kairouani calligraphy.  He began revisiting and reviving the script with the tentmakers of Cairo using a distinct vocabulary drawn from Sufi idioms and 'tasawwuf' of Sufi mystical phrases.

'Al Khayamiya' is the name given to the applique crafted textiles made by the Tentmakers and is derived from the Arabic word 'Khayma' which means 'tent'. Rachid Koraïchi through his research found that the traditions of applique predate the advent of Islam and the Arabs. During Pharaonic times as part of funerary rites the priests would drape the Pharaoh in sacred Egyptian cotton shrouds covered with religious symbolism and pictograms from their cosmology that they would hand weave through applique. Koraïchi thus titles his banners as ' Suaires Bleus Des Pharaons ( Blue shrouds of the Pharaohs) '. The aesthetics of these banners are drawn from the Sufi talismans of the 'Hurufiyya movement'. Hurufiyya  - a contemporary art movement founded by the likes of the Egyptian artist Hamed Abdalla drew its vocabulary from Sufi esoterism. You have to strain to decipher the meaning from its complex calligraphic and geometric patterns. At once it is an art object, a vision of meditation, remembrance and a revival of a script.

Koraïchi whilst working along with a potter on the island of Djerba in Tunisia asked him why he was slowly kneading the clay? The potter replied that the mud held traces of the flesh and bones of the many who returned their primordial form after death and thus came to constitute the clay.  Such simple wisdom of respect found among artisans and lay men of the Maghreb was drawn from their adherence to Sufi philosophy. Koraïchi began experimenting with Islamic pottery in Tunisia drawn to the medium for the deep civilisational ethos it held. In the Quran among the verses of ' Surah i-Rahman, Chapter 55 Verse 55:14 it reads "We created man from clay like [that of] pottery'. In western archaeology remnants of civilisations are measured by the finding and carbon dating of their terracotta figurines, vessels and vases. 

He titles a set of wide open vases 'jarres de clot et naama' or ' Jars from Clot and Naama' that are made in ceramic using a distinct indigo blue common in Andalusia and the Maghreb. Named after the industrial neighbourhood of El Clot in Madrid and the Western Algerian city of Naama where recently an ancient terracotta vase was found in its arid desert landscape. Using its shape Koraïchi produced these ceramics in his studio in El Clot. These white ceramic jars are adorned with blue mystical verses, diagrams and charts. The ode to Blue comes not only from a Azur Andalusian heritage but its significance within Sufi esotericism. According to Koraïchi, blue represents invisibility. We perceive the skies above as Blue but we cannot capture its colour for it is as intangible as thin air , similarly when we swim the Mediterranean we cannot carry away with us the aquamarine blue of the sea water as it turns transparent when scooped from the sea. Here he makes a deep metaphorical reference to our souls and shadows that accompany us through our lives and into our coffins upon death.

Jardin D'Afrique or the 'Garden of Africa' is a garden that lays to rest bodies of unclaimed migrants who lost their lives while attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Divided into 7 parts reflecting the seven stages of Sufism, shaded by 5 olive trees and scented by the flowers of jasmine that grow across this special cemetery that Koraïchi laid in the town of Zarzis in Tunisia every element holds deep symbolism. This plot of land undivided by faith restores dignity at death to those fleeing war and hunger. Koraïchi's practice can be narrowly seen from the lens of reviving the ancient decorative crafts and steeped in detail and technique but his practice has deep underlayers of politics and conceptual thinking. As a young man when he visited Egypt he reflected on how the dependence on craft for daily quotidian items of utility in his native Algeria was disappearing. He then decided to lend his authorship as a conceptual collaboration to the artisans as an act of sowing value and ensuring continuity of a tradition. 

Koraïchi plays the role of an artist who intervenes into available artisanal occupations of North Africa much like the conceptualists had used industrial produced objects or popular media from advertising such as serigraphy. He prints an edition of lithographs where each series of lithographs is dedicated to a celebrated Sufi saint, figure or scholar such as Ibn Arabi, Rumi and Sidi Boumediene. He also makes a special singular edition lithograph of the hand of Fatima which represents the five pillars of Islam but also the family tree of the progeny of the Prophet. The hand also called the 'Hamsa' has its origins as the representation of the Carthagian Goddess Tanit who had her temple near the mausoleum of Sidi Bou Said on the sea in suburban Tunis. Koraïchi is a prolific printmaker who trained himself in Paris with varied techniques of etching and lithography. Printmaking became popular when it was industrialised to print pages for the Bible and for Christian iconography so as to make religious literature accessible. The access of knowledge led to enlightenment and soon gravures depicting scenes of distant lands became popular peaking the curiosity of people. The Scramble for Africa began just afterwards as colonisation came as a force to civilise people to a Eurocentric cultural ethos.

The role of an artist in Metropolitan Europe within a post-industrial landscape differs from that of an artisan in North Africa. Koraïchi embraces the multi-faceted role of an artist specially after Joseph Beuys's assertion with the statement that ' Everyman is an Artist!'. But he does not imbibe the nihilism towards materiality, pattern and utility of objects expected out of a contemporary artist. Rather than making an object devoid of any spiritual currency he adorns it with many metaphors that are deeply layered in their image and the process of production. This is his aesthetic dissent towards European art, its gaze and the philosophical underpinnings that do not hold true for the rest of humanity. He refuses to be called a calligrapher, ceramicist or applique tentmaker and is confident of assuming the vocation of an artist.  

The Casbah or the old city near the fortress is a recurring feature across the Maghreb and the Levant. The Casbah of Algiers is where those leading the movement for the freedom of Algeria would hide, organise and recuperate. Beyond the colonial 'White Towns' people in the Casbah persevered the humiliations of colonialism through the strength of faith and esoteric acts of Sufism such as 'Dhikr'. Spiritual life intervened with secular acts such as the cuisine, dress and artisanal practices. The history of many centuries was alive among people who lived in a modern political clime that saw many negotiations in the face of oppression and violence.  Koraïchi studied urbanism because the architecture and the life around a city held great interest to him especially as it came to use much later in his practice while designing the 'Garden of Africa'. Rachid Koraïchi has made his art a monument to the many martyrdoms that afflict his land and people. As the people of Palestine in the face of war, the communities of immigrants who have survived environmental and violent devastation in places such as Congo, Burma, Syria and Venezuela join hands in solidarity to survive annihilation Koraïchi echoes their voice in solidarity through his artistic practice.  

Paris / Naples 2025