In The Horse and the Aljya, 2021, Tunisian artist Mouna Jemal Siala reimagines a fourth-century Roman mosaic as a contemporary meditation on material culture, memory, and the ways visual history is passed down and reinterpreted across time. The artwork was created entirely by Jemal Siala herself, during a period of isolation and stillness. With time on her hands during the COVID-19 pandemic, she immersed herself in Tunisian history and material culture, crafting the work slowly, piece by piece. The process reflects a deep respect for manual labor and historical continuity, echoing traditional crafts while speaking to a contemporary desire for slowness, attention, and connection.

Jemal Siala’s version is no simple replica; rather, the artist decided to amplify the small image into something monumental, echoing the expansive weight of history itself. The artwork is composed of sixteen metal-framed panels and includes several contemporary additions absent from the original piece (the 10x10 cm mosaic depicting a racehorse – common in Roman iconography). She introduces two landscape photographs, printed on plexiglass and layered one on top of the other. These images, subtle yet disorienting, create a visual glitch within the grid. They represent two temporalities, the past and the present, coexisting in a single visual field, as if time has been folded in on itself. Their placement, slightly askew from the symmetry of the mosaic, introduces a sense of rupture, drawing the viewer’s attention to what lies beyond the surface of historical reconstruction.

The artist also includes a printed image of a wooden cabinet, which she photographed after encountering it alone in the middle of a field during a walk in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown. Its quiet, uncanny presence lingered in her memory. Unlike the landscapes, which abstract time, the cabinet anchors the work in a specific moment and personal encounter. For Jemal Siala, cabinets and closets hold symbolic weight: “They carry the weight of family stories, memories, everyday gestures, sometimes even secrets…They are silent witnesses that survive the passing of time.” In a world where we often understand the past through material remnants, the cabinet stands in for the unspoken histories we inherit through objects, those we keep, store away, or stumble upon unexpectedly.

The craftsmanship required for this work emphasizes the artist’s commitment to the material process. Instead of recreating the mosaic in stone, Jemal Siala constructed her own system of “pixels”crafted by hand. Each pixel is a small square of metal, filled and set in place with precision, evoking both the logic of traditional mosaics and the rhythmic structure of textile practices like cross-stitch. Through these labor-intensive components Jemal Siala bridges ancient technique with contemporary form, while preserving a sense of craft, care, and physical memory.

The result is a work that collapses boundaries, between old and new, archive and invention, monument and domestic object. The mosaic becomes a site of reinvention. By introducing the cabinet and reimagining the tesserae as metal pixels,  Jemal Siala asserts the artist’s role not only as translator of history, but as its co-author. She reminds us that history is never fixed, it is continuously rewritten through what we choose to highlight, preserve, and reinterpret.