Contemporary Textile Art on a Traditional Loom with Soumiya

Soumiya is a Moroccan artist whose sculptural textile work bridges architecture, craft, and contemporary design. Trained as an architect, she combines structural thinking with the tactile language of thread, creating pieces that often serve as permeable walls, windows, or light filters. Honored with the title Maalma—once reserved for master artisans of the Medinas—Soumiya is recognized as a guardian of textile traditions and a tusserande, or weaver of stories. She has trained nearly 5,000 artisans across Morocco, revitalizing endangered techniques and inventing new ones to keep textile traditions evolving.

Drawing inspiration from North African nomadic heritage, she works with natural, recycled, and unexpected materials like wool, raffia, hemp, plastic tape, leather, copper wire, feathers, and stones. She sources these from Marrakech’s medina and surrounding nature, then experiments on her eight looms to create new textures and visual languages. Her work draws on ancestral Moroccan techniques such as loom embroidery, lace, and complex stripe weaving, which she restores and reinterprets in a modern context. Incorporating photography and sculptural elements, her textiles act like soft architecture—defining space, filtering light, and inviting sensory connection.

For Soumiya, creation is a transformative process, a way to reach the universal through the intimate. “I feel as if I’m interpreting a score that a soft and melodious voice pours into my soul,” she says.

She welcomes you to explore materials and the rich history of North African textiles. Her aim is not to preserve it in static form but to let it breathe, evolve, and connect across generations and cultures.