A machrabiyah is a wood screen that lets in the light and casts shadows in Arabi and mauresque architecture.
Shadows shape an image, an object, or is it the light?
Coming from two distincly different cultural background ( Moroccan /Austrian) I feel that culture, heritage and personal history enhance our outlook on life, our identity, our character, enrich it, and at the same time, it can also hinder it, blind us, suffocate us, irritate us, bind us. Casting shadows in some areas, letting light in.
Similarly, to what we see it can do the same to what we are, it sticks to our skin, like a tattoo, like a DNA,
like finger prints.
I tried to escape some aspect of my culture, until I understood I had to either tame it, speak its language, be smarter, use it as ornament, deprogram and reprogram, but certainly not run away from it.
Like a machrabiah, filtering the light and the heat of the sun on hot days inside a home, it can let in the information, filter it, clothes it ,
draw a pattern, interpret it, hide certain areas, certain thoughts.
I used traditionnal moroccan pattern and layered it over parts of the body with a certain body language, and setting a dialogue in a purely geometric way between the body for and the shadows, like a tattoo.