Behind the Ademkal Curtain: Collaboration at the Heart of Memòri
Memòri began as an act of remembering. Founded in Marseille in 2020, the small studio sets out to revive fragile practices across the Mediterranean by intertwining ethnography, material research and patient collaboration in a living practice that asks how craft can be sustained, remunerated and reimagined in ways that respect both people and landscape.
Siroua sheep in the mountains of Morocco. Photo: Pierre Girardin
At the centre of this endeavour is the Siroua sheep — a mountain breed whose long, silky fleece has underpinned Moroccan weaving traditions. Found on high plateaus between the Toubkal massif and the desert, the Siroua’s fleece produces unusually long fibres (reaching up to 30 cm) and a tactile silkiness prized by tribal weavers. Yet this breed, which is integral to a regional ecological and cultural system, is vulnerable. Since 2017 Memòri, alongside Maroc Inédit and local partners, has helped launch the Siroua Wool Project: an initiative to protect the breed, improve shearing and sorting practices, and ensure that shepherds and weavers share in the wool’s value.
Women spinners and weavers of the Feija tribe. Photo: Pierre Girardin
These efforts ripple down to a remote Anti-Atlas village where women of the Feija tribe continue to handspin with rare finesse. Here, loom work and spinning are social rites as much as craft: bridal veils and ceremonial textiles are stitched into family memory, decorated with henna motifs and passed from mother to daughter. Memòri’s practice is built on long residencies, collective experimentation and mutual trust — weeks and months spent sitting with weavers, testing natural dyes, refining spun yarns and listening to the workflows that sustain these fragile economies...
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Image Credits:
Lead: Ademkal curtain by Memòri. Handspun and handwoven local wool, dyed with different plants from the region.
All further images as credited in photo captions.