Rachid Koraïchi on memory, mourning and migration

Rachid Koraïchi, who works in France and Tunisia, has spent five decades tackling weighty topics in his work: from faith and family, to history and remembrance. These notions have inspired his prolific output of ceramics, etchings, textiles, sculptures and installations, collected by institutions across the world, including the British Museum in London and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. The artist’s symbol-laden pieces draw on his fascination with signs and glyphs from a variety of cultures, while notions of memory and mourning also thread through his output. In a year scarred by the losses of the pandemic – and with the refugee crisis still ongoing in the Mediterranean – his work is more resonant than ever.

This June, Koraïchi inaugurated the Jardin d'Afrique (Garden of Africa) in Zarzis, Tunisia: a non-denominational graveyard he has created for the migrants who have lost their lives on the way to Europe. He tells us more about his work and how the cemetery took shape.

‘My work is rooted in the Islamic artistic tradition, but I studied art in the western mode and was trained in pottery, metalwork, sculpture and easel painting. When I was born, Algeria was a department of France. My country has been colonised by different peoples over thousands of years – the Romans, the Babylonians, the Syrians, the Phoenicians – then, in the 19th century, the French. Going further back, there are ancient rock paintings in the Sahara Desert region of Tassili n’Ajjer that date from 5000 bce. This complex web of civilisations forms my ancestral roots.

It’s vital to react to humanitarian disasters as a human first, and an artist second. There’s a coastal area in Tunisia near the port of Zarzis where the ocean’s currents wash up the bodies of people who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean. As local officials refused to bury the corpses of non-Muslims, they were being thrown on the rubbish tip. I couldn’t stand the thought that human beings fleeing poverty, climate change and war were ending up in landfill. I wanted them to rest in an honourable place, so in 2018 I bought agricultural land there to turn into a private cemetery: the Garden of Africa. It’s a huge task – I’m funding it by myself, with no governmental help. It will be a place of remembrance, filled with fragrant plants that recall Paradise as described in the Koran. I’ve created two huge steles for the wrought-iron gates, as symbolic guardians. They’re facsimiles of funerary monuments belonging to my ancestors in Dagestan that have been digitally scanned then carved in alabaster using 3D cutters by Factum Arte.

I keep thinking about the oceans of tears caused by the loss of these migrants. When I was making work for my recent show Tears that Taste of the Sea [at October Gallery in London], I was inspired by the ancient Roman lachrymatory bottles: tiny vessels in which mourners collected their tears. To reflect the scale of death in the Mediterranean, I made giant versions of them, nearly a metre high, with four handles that allude to the idea of it being held by both a mother and father.

My next idea is what keeps me going. Some of my projects can take years to finish. The installation Path of Roses (1995-2005), for example, took 10 years – it’s an homage to the 13th-century Sufi poets Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi. A project such as this one comprises a variety of materials – metal sculptures, ceramics, carved stone and weavings – often made in multiple places by different artisans. It takes a long time to assemble the elements together.

I collaborate with a range of talent in my work. Factum Arte are cutting-edge fabricators and have been helping me make large alabaster sculptures, and I work with the Compagnons du Devoir, an organisation of French travelling artisans that dates back to the Middle Ages. The difference between an artisan and an artist is that one repeats a technique or idea, while the other creates something new. In my work as an artist, I draw on the technical abilities of artisans across the world. They bring great skill, often dating back thousands of years, while I bring ideas.

There are thousands of my pieces stored in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and Tunis. My dream is to find an institution that would take all this work so the public could see it. It saddens me that neither my home country, Algeria, nor France, where I’ve lived for nearly 50 years, own a piece. I want my creativity to outlive me. It’s not just the lives we live that matter, but the gifts we leave for future generations.’