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The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End
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Rachid Koraïchi (Algerian, b.1947)
Four Panels from 7 Variations on Indigo (detail), 2002
Serigraphy on Aleppo silk, ink, and paint; each: 10 ft. 6 in. x 18 7/8 in. (320 x 48 cm)
Collection of the artist
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This is a detail view of a selection of seven vertical panels that include elements from an installation of indigo scripted banners and rectangular panels featured at the Vieille Charité; in Marseille in 2003. In this work Rachid Koraïchi foregrounds the deep-seated human appeal of a single color exchanged in trade networks that interconnected Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The ubiquitous deep blue dye—indigo, a commodity obtained from various plants—has been used in virtually every culture. It is likely that it figured importantly in the trade between the northern and sub-Saharan regions of the continent as early as 500 B.C. when the Berbers were using horses and donkeys to draw chariots from Morocco south to the Senegal River and from Carthage to the middle Niger River.
In 7 Variations, the component of twenty-eight vertical banners evokes Islamic traditions used to display the genealogy of Muslim brotherhoods painted in gold. In Koraïchi's creation, the life of the eighth-century Sufi female mystic Rabia al-Adawiya is celebrated. Composed of silk woven and dyed with indigo by Syrian artisans in the city of Aleppo, the columnar inscriptions intertwine invented visual calligraphic imagery with inverted Arabic poetic texts drawn from the mystic's Songs of the Recluse. Designed to be suspended from on high, these elegant gossamer invocations span the divide between heaven and earth. On a purely formal level they also physically monumentalize the omnipresent vertical band of sub-Saharan textiles.
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