Written by Christelle El Chamy

Fatiha Zemmouri, born in 1966 in Casablanca, is a multidisciplinary Moroccan artist whose work spans painting, sculpture, ceramics, drawing, and collage. Growing up in the busy, modern sprawl of Casablanca, Zemmouri was always aware of the loss of rural roots, ancestral memory, and the quiet rhythms of nature. This awareness shaped her artistic vision very early on. 

In 1987, she enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca, where she received formal training in visual arts. It was there that she encountered a wide range of techniques and materials. However, a pivotal turning point came years later, in 2002, when she took part in a primitive pottery internship led by Marcel Muller. Though she began her practice with portraiture, it was the encounter with raw, elemental matter that would set the tone for her mature work. The experience was revelatory. Clay became more than a material, it became a language, a way to speak about time, fragility, and identity. 

Rather than depict nature, Zemmouri’s work seeks to embody it, drawing the elements – clay, charcoal, fire, earth, and water – into a transformative, almost alchemical process. Her abstract and minimalist compositions are charged with emotional resonance, evoking cycles of destruction and regeneration. Living between Casablanca and Marrakech, Zemmouri remains connected to the environmental degradation, urban expansion, and socio-political tensions that permeate Moroccan life and shape her work. Her materials are sourced with intention; she uses local clay, untreated charcoal, stones and earth, thus further grounding her practice in Moroccan soil while allowing it to reach global conversations.

Since her first solo exhibition in Rabat in 1999, Zemmouri has sustained a deep engagement with materiality, treating it as a living language through which to explore states of vulnerability, resilience, and change. Her practice unfolds as an evolving dialogue with matter, shaped by and responsive to the world around her. Her use of organic materials and conceptual abstraction aligns with a wider current in North African art that, from the late 1990s onward, has embraced experimentation, embodied memory, and narrative as critical tools of expression. 

One of her most notable works, À l’abri...de rien (Sheltered...from Nothing), 2016, is a site-specific installation conceived for the 6^th Marrakech Biennale. Suspended within the ruins of the Palais El Badii, the piece presents a massive polystyrene and plaster boulder, measuring 7.4 meters, and weighing 250 kilograms, seemingly wedged with exact precision between two ancient stone walls.  Hovering just overhead at the end of a narrow passage, the sculpture looks like something ancient, but its precarious placement and scale create a sense of immediacy and unease. With this boulder in unstable equilibrium between two walls, Zemmouri attempts to recreate a “zone of discomfort” in the face of danger, whether real or imagined. Its calculated instability becomes a sculptural embodiment of the instability shaping the contemporary moment, where media-fueled anxieties blur the boundaries between perception and threat. With its raw texture and ambiguous levitation, the rock evokes both the permanence of stone and the ephemerality of fear. The suspended stone alludes to the “rough stone” found in alchemical and mystical traditions, an uncarved form that symbolizes latent power, imperfection, and the possibility of transformation.

In her artwork Night on Earth, 2023, part of the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation collection (DAF), Fatiha Zemmouri presents an 80 x 80 x 4 cm mixed media piece made from soil and pigments on a wooden panel. The work reflects the artist's commitment to integrating earth-derived substances. She uses soil sourced from Tahannaout, a town near Marrakech, as both medium and message, combining the nuanced application of pigments and creating a textured surface highlighting the interplay between the natural world and human expression. The surface appears dark and densely layered, with tonal shifts between deep earthen browns and matte black, interrupted by evenly spaced, horizontal striations combed into the soil. These shallow grooves ripple across the panel like sediment lines or tillage marks, giving the work a quiet, meditative rhythm and evoking the passage of time etched into the land. Zemmouri’s use of pigments, like burnt sienna or umber, deepen the visual resonance, creating subtle shifts in tone that mimic the natural textures of dried or cracked earth. The choice of a wooden panel as the substrate further emphasizes the organic nature of the piece, grounding it in the physicality of the earth. The rhythmic, furrow-like grooves generate a tension between stillness and implied motion through their interaction with light. This illusion of movement, produced through repeated lines and varied depth, recalls geological processes and natural cycles of erosion and renewal. As with much of Zemmouri’s work, Night on Earth evokes a dialogue between the elemental and the constructed, grounding abstraction in material memory and tactile experience.

Zemmouri’s technique is defined not only by her choice of materials, but by the way she allows those materials to speak on their own terms. She layers, burns, presses, and sometimes suspends her components, often relinquishing full control so that elemental forces – fire, gravity, time – become co-creators. Imperfections such as cracks, ash marks, and surface irregularities are not hidden; they are integral to the work’s narrative. There is a sense of quiet drama in her work, as each piece feels like it has survived something.  In a way, Zemmouri’s pieces bear the marks of weathering and transformation, suggesting that they hold the memory of both trauma and repair.

Themes of loss, renewal, and rootedness flow consistently through her art. Zemmouri often returns to the idea of place, not as geography, but as emotional and cultural terrain. Even in her more conceptual pieces, the body and the land remain close. Her installations and sculptures often evoke shelters, borders, or suspended states, representing moments of waiting, surviving, and hoping. In her Paper Borders - Concrete Borders series, 2021, Zemmouri crumples maps and transfers them onto sheets of cold, hard metal, transforming the once-flat representations of space into sculptural objects of rupture and resistance. These metallic folds stand in for the real and psychological boundaries that still divide people and histories. Through this tactile confrontation, Zemmouri invites the viewer to reflect not only on the lines drawn between one another, but on what it means to carry the weight of a border within.

Zemmouri’s impact extends far beyond the Moroccan art scene. Her pieces are housed in major private and public collections, including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and MACAAL in Marrakech. She has shown her work across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and continues to challenge the boundaries of what materials can do, and what they can say. Zemmouri has contributed to redefining ceramics not as decorative or utilitarian, but as a sculptural language of conceptual depth. Her work resonates with artists who explore memory, ecology, and migration, influencing how materials are approached in contemporary art.

Today, Fatiha Zemmouri’s practice remains vital and ever-evolving. She continues to experiment, pushing her materials to their physical and symbolic limits, and drawing meaning from their transformation. In a world often overwhelmed by noise, her work insists on the value of silence, texture, and slowness. It invites the viewer to pause, observe with care, and feel. Rather than offering resolution, her pieces hold tension, evoke memory, and open space for reflection.

Edited by Elsie Labban

Notes

¹ Babelfan. n.d. Zemmouri Fatiha. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://new.vosartistes.com/oeuvre/oeuvre-noire-et-charbon-de-zemmouri/.

² Zemmouri, Fatiha. n.d. Biography. Accessed April 30, 2025. https://fatihazemmouri.com/biography/.

³ Walaw. 2025. Moroccan artist Fatiha Zemmouri creates poetic narratives through material transformation. January 22. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://sport.walaw.press/en/articles/moroccan_artist_fatiha_zemmouri_creates_poetic_narratives_through_material_transformation/GMFRQXRMWQQM.

⁴ Vanin, Fabio. 2016. À L’ABRI...DE RIEN (SHELTERED... FROM NOTHING). Accessed May 1 2025. https://www.instituteforpublicart.org/case-studies/a-labri.de-rien-sheltered-from-nothing/.

⁵ Institut Culture Islam. 2021. Zone Franche - entretien avec Fatiha Zemmouri. January 23. Accessed May 1, 2025.

⁶ Houssais, Maud. 2022. Fatiha Zemmouri - Hors-Sol. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://www.nosbaumreding.com/en/artists/exhibitiondetails/15559/fatiha-zemmouri-hors-sol?iae=303#art-1.

⁷ Comptoir des mines Galerie. n.d. Fatiha Zemmouri. Accessed May 2, 2025. https://cmgmarrakech.com/en/fatiha-zemmouri/.

⁸ Zemmouri, Fatiha. n.d. Biography. Accessed April 30, 2025. https://fatihazemmouri.com/biography/.

⁹ Institut Culture Islam. 2021. Zone Franche - entretien avec Fatiha Zemmouri. January 23. Accessed May 1, 2025.

¹⁰ Institut Culture Islam. 2021. Zone Franche - entretien avec Fatiha Zemmouri. January 23. Accessed May 1, 2025.

¹¹ https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2025/01/165578/fatiha-zemmouri-transforming-raw-materials-into-poetic-narratives-through-art/

Sources

Zemmouri, Fatiha. n.d. Biography. Accessed April 30, 2025. https://fatihazemmouri.com/biography/.

Babelfan. n.d. Zemmouri Fatiha. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://new.vosartistes.com/oeuvre/oeuvre-noire-et-charbon-de-zemmouri/.

Walaw. 2025. Moroccan artist Fatiha Zemmouri creates poetic narratives through material transformation. January 22. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://sport.walaw.press/en/articles/moroccan_artist_fatiha_zemmouri_creates_poetic_narratives_through_material_transformation/GMFRQXRMWQQM.

Houssais, Maud. 2022. Fatiha Zemmouri - Hors-Sol. Accessed May 1, 2025. https://www.nosbaumreding.com/en/artists/exhibitiondetails/15559/fatiha-zemmouri-hors-sol?iae=303#art-1.

Vanin, Fabio. 2016. À L’ABRI...DE RIEN (SHELTERED... FROM NOTHING). Accessed May 1 2025. https://www.instituteforpublicart.org/case-studies/a-labri.de-rien-sheltered-from-nothing/.

Comptoir des mines Galerie. n.d. Fatiha Zemmouri. Accessed May 2, 2025. https://cmgmarrakech.com/en/fatiha-zemmouri/.

Institut Culture Islam. 2021. Zone Franche - entretien avec Fatiha Zemmouri. January 23. Accessed May 1, 2025.

Asraoui, Zayneb El. 2025. Fatiha Zemmouri: Transforming Raw Materials into Poetic Narratives Through Art. January 21. Accessed May 3, 2025. https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2025/01/165578/fatiha-zemmouri-transforming-raw-materials-into-poetic-narratives-through-art/.

Fatiha Zemmouri. 2019. Paper Borders – Concrete Borders. Accessed May 3, 2025. https://fatihazemmouri.com/works/paper-borders-concrete-borders/.