AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

Mohamed Zouzaf is a contemporary artist who is best known in certain parts of Europe and his home country of Morocco. However, even those new to his work will feel familiarity and warmth in their hieroglyphic and petroglyphic symbology. He draws deeply on his Amazigh culture’s traditions and languages to create a fluid, but meticulous composition that invokes a meditative, almost spiritual connection with viewers who engage with his pieces.

One of his works though, despite all its beauty, has created a conundrum for several conservators since its creation in the late 90s as it is both a work of art and a functional object meant to exist outside of a museum setting. The piece is a composite object—a double-sided four panel paravent screen comprised of paper-covered plywood covered with multiple parchment fragments and fit into a carved wood frame—all attached and built by the artist. Zouzaf used the skins in their entireties as the basis for his drawings, often preserving their curving arcs and sharp angles when cutting down the skins into pieces, then puzzling them together across the panels to create a harmonious form. The parchment pieces are decorated with Zouzaf’s unique symbols using handmade pigments from materials gathered in the Atlas Mountains and finished with an unknown coating that gives the screen a glowing golden quality.

All of these components have their own conflicting properties that were enhanced by the fact that it is meant to exist in a lived environment—and that the final environments it passed through ended up being vastly different from that of its origin of Morocco. Most prominent of the concerns affecting the screen was the failure of the original adhesives used to attach the parchment to the panel. This separation began shortly after the screen left Morocco and resulted in it being conserved twice—once in Paris, France and once at NEDCC in Andover, MA—before the third, most recent intervention. In conducting the most recent treatment of this piece at NEDCC again, the previous methods were examined more closely and modified to find the balance needed to straddle the line between artistic intent, environmental restrictions, and object materiality by drawing on traditional conservation parchment mounting techniques as a foundation. Various paper and protein substrates were tested, as well as broad range of adhesives to determine the most flexible and stabilizing solution. Reacting to and the reactivity of the treatment provided a unique challenge as the addition of hinges to hold the pieces in a way that embraced the artist's intent, but allowed for intentional flexing was not an easy line to walk. Overall, it was hoped that utilizing an adaptive attachment would result in less future interventive work while embracing the living nature of the paravent's components.