PARIS — Eighteen shiny silver coins, 20 turquoise beads and a square of coral — and that is merely for the headdress of a Berber bride.
Worn across the chest of the tribeswoman are silver chains, circlets attached to more chains, chunks of amber inset with egg-shaped silver baubles and glass beads in red, green, yellow and black, colors that symbolize fertility.
Can jewels be about empowerment as well as adornment? That is the question posed by a fascinating exhibition here that focuses on North Africa.
“Berber Women of Morocco,” at the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent until July 20, transports the viewer to the Atlas Mountains by way of the Berber Museum. The museum is in a former artist’s studio at the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakesh, Morocco, and was restored by Mr. Bergé and Saint Laurent before the couturier’s death to house their collection of more than 600 Berber items.
By preserving the ritual objects of this centuries-old society, the two men created an archive that goes far beyond tribal clothing. Film and photographs taken in the early- to mid-20th century, for example, bring the embellishments vividly to life.
Photo
Credit Nicolas Mateus, Luc Castel
There are no vitrines of clothes in the exhibition, in part because Berber body coverings are flat fabrics folded around the body and held together with jewelry. But Bjorn Dahlstrom, the curator of the Majorelle museum and this exhibition, has taken that one step closer to abstraction by displaying the clothes only as images projected on flat screens under a twinkling starry “sky.”
So the display cases focus on the jewelry, in all its hefty intensity, giving some inkling of the significance of these pieces and their origins. Items from different peoples, including Arabs and Jews, who blended with the Berbers, make for a feast for the eyes.
The clinking, weighty objects — wondrous inventions of sculpture and decoration — are significant for the messages they create.
Fertility was inevitably on that list, but wealth and social hierarchy were worked in, along with the filigree decoration.
In the accompanying book, published by Artlys, an essay by Cynthia Becker, a professor of art and architecture history at Boston University, explains how the body adornments are not only masterpieces of Berber identity, but also reveal the strength of women within their tribal worlds. There is a fierceness to the pieces, with their bright, beaten silver contrasting with colorful stones, each with a particular meaning.
While not suggesting warrior women, not one piece could remotely be associated with decorative jewelry, as most societies today perceive it.
Yet there are touching examples of comradeship.
One of the pictures in a slide show, taken in the 1930s, shows women’s hands creating a circle around a woven cloth holding tangerines. Each wrist has four, five or six bracelets; fingers are thick with rings. But the image is of unity, rather than decoration.
And although the Berber women of this century have learned to appreciate gold more than silver, they still wear the ancestral pieces for weddings, proving that what have often been described as “accessories” are still at the heart of their world.
The exhibition is to travel next year to Manama, Bahrain, and Rabat, Morocco.
