How did you come to meet the potters of Sejnane, in Tunisia?
Selma: I came across a piece of pottery in the window of an art gallery in Paris. I immediately recognised the anthropomorphic figurine made by the women of that region. This Sejnane doll was being sold at an exorbitant price, and knowing the precarious conditions in which these women survive, I was struck by a sense of injustice. Sejnane is one of the poorest regions in Tunisia. The women who work there have mastered a craft three thousand years old. It’s a precious tradition passed down from mothers to daughters. They then sell their creations by the roadside at meagre prices to support their families. Standing in front of the gallery window, I saw the gap between a craft on the verge of disappearing and the speculative bubble the art market had built around that object—knowing full well that the profits from the sale of this piece were never intended to benefit these women.
Sofiane: When Selma called me to tell me about this discovery, we decided to go meet these women. We ended up meeting about sixty of them. We realised they live in scattered hamlets, far from one another. There are about two hundred and thirty of them across the region, but they never see each other except at weddings and funerals. They don’t work together. They are exploited, caught in a competitive system due to the economic hardships of the region. From this observation, we decided to create a popular artistic workshop we called Laaroussa, a self-managed community where creation becomes a vector of human dignity. Other artists joined us to denounce the harshness of their working conditions and to explore the physicality, strength, and skill of these women. This project was born at the intersection of our respective disciplines, in full respect of each person’s practice. We wanted to create a reflective, grounded, and contextual laboratory.
What was your working process like? How did dance come to resonate with their gestures?
Sofiane: These artisan ceramists have mastered a powerful artistic potential. It is an ancient, anthropological knowledge. It’s a legacy they carry, though it is also driven by need and necessity, because these gestures are their means of survival. The making of these dolls contains their intimate breath. Watching them work, one has the feeling of being in the presence of goddesses with the power to breathe life into things. We asked ourselves how to create a contemporary aesthetic around their work. How can we make them visible? We were confronted with a sense of urgency when we realised that this gesture was not archived anywhere. We then decided to write a score that did not draw on any existing notation system, in order for them all to be able to understand those symbols. For us, it was about honouring the history of this land and the value of these women. This first act was an offering.
Selma: We tried to understand the density and nuances of their work by putting our own hands in the clay, observing their postures, their commitment, the way they shape matter. Their gestures are performative; they embrace the world they knead. There is a rhythm at play, musical inflections, silences… We worked with three generations of women—Jemaa, who embodied an archive of ancestral knowledge and recently passed away, her daughter Cherifa, and her granddaughter Lamia—to focus on the precision of the gestures they pass down. We wanted to reflect the porous transition from one state to another, between us as observers and them as creators, who through the mastery of their art brought about a transformation in us as well. It was through these long periods of observation that we built a shared space. For us, this research is vital: reinventing dreamed spaces that unite, while respecting the uniqueness of each individual.
Sofiane: In conversation with filmmaker Cécile Thuillier, we also wanted to give form to this research through a documentary. We presented this eleven-minute video to the women of Sejnane. It was a true exchange between our practice of dance and their work with matter. Each of us, in our own way, works with the body, in the multiplicity of its perceptions. We wanted to share a collective breath, to create together an intimate space without borders.
You created Laaroussa Duetto in 2013. Why did you then feel the need to reinvent this show for a quartet?
Selma: Following a conversation with Okwui Enwezar—the late art curator who passed away in 2019—the video we had presented in Sejnane was later shown in many museums as part of exhibitions, triennials, biennials… At first, we felt uneasy about this circulation through institutional spaces, far removed from the reality of the region, because our intention had been to offer an aesthetic object—this video—to the women potters. But we eventually understood that it was another way of honouring their ancestral know-how. We created Laaroussa Duetto at the KunstenFestivaldesArts in 2013. It already adopted the structure of a choreodocumentary and allowed us to exhibit our working material, in keeping with our research on ancestral gestures. It allowed us to bring to the stage this vocabulary we had created in Sejnane, while gradually stepping away from our experience there. We began exploring the sonata format, with a duet for violin and cello, followed by a piece in three movements (Allegro, Adagio, Rondo) inspired by the women’s gestures and the repertoire we had created.
Sofiane: The creation of this quartet for three dancers and a pianist—following an invitation by the Festival d’Avignon—gave us the opportunity to share our protocols and choreographic scores for the first time with professionals from the contemporary dance scene. On stage, we project the video we shot in Sejnane, which serves as a bridge to the performance. In this film, Selma and I make brief appearances. The sixty women potters are shown on screen. We witness the transformation of their gestures by the performers, their reinterpretation from both a choreographic and musical perspective. These three layers of interpretation coexist and intersect to speak about the connection that binds us to this land and this history, all set to Aisha Orazbayeva’s precious musical composition.
Interview conducted by Marion Guilloux in February 2025.