Elise El Yousfi in conversation with Lina Ejdaa

On Melancholia, Diaspora and Language

Over the course of several months and seasons, Elise El Yousfi and I met repeatedly: over coffee, in her studio, through books and shared readings. She showed me different worlds, because she is, herself, of different worlds. Our conversations circled around words and poetry, melancholia, the experience of speaking a language without speaking it, and always, eventually, the writings of Palestinian author Mahmoud Darwish.

How does one translate an impossible story into image, into material, into form? The question of language and translation, its violence, its intimacy, its politics, runs through El Yousfi’s work in many registers. Situating her practice at the intersection of sculpture and poetry, writing takes on a central place in her work. To write, for her, is like to sculpt or to make, a way of thinking and feeling what remains unresolved, what appears impossible, ways of standing, however precariously, in relation to one's own melancholia.

Melancholia is the tone of someone who senses the intangible, a feeling that resists articulation and, in resisting, pushes language to its limits. In El Yousfi’s visual language melancholia translates as diasporic grief, one that leaves her wondering: “what does it mean to grow up when the past keeps returning as a haunting?” The past, she reflects, is never simply past. It keeps resurfacing, shaping the present in ways that remain unspoken and untold, present enough to be felt, never legible enough to be fully known. And it is precisely within that gap, between feeling and knowing, that a longing for her heritage persists.

M-resident Elise El Yousfi — Kimberley Dhollander (Evenbeeld) voor M Leuven

Hers is a practice of being where you are while remaining in relation to where you are also from. The diasporic subject holds, in one hand, the distance, and in the other, the heritage, and she decides, not once and not finally but continuously, in each making, what to bring forward. As El Yousfi puts it, "the melancholic feeling is not something that should be eliminated, but something to dwell with and attend to."

She negotiates this absence into a presence through her practice. To work on Morocco is, for her, to bring the land with her, to treat the landscape as a collaborator. The natural materials she gathers and carries with her, orange blossom and date palm, are burned into ash, and this ash becomes the basis of the glaze that coats her ceramic sculptures. In this way, the land does not return merely as an image of loss, but as a substance that remains, literally, present within her work.

If ash is the residue of one kind of memory, baby powder is another. It returns in her installations as a material that reactivates an affective register proper to childhood: softness, the sensation of being carried and innocence. Here, memory lives in the experience the material evokes. Lace, by contrast, carries memory within itself, as traces of use and inheritance. As a collector of lace, El Yousfi is drawn to it precisely for its intimacy, which binds it to the body and to touch, and its legacy, which binds it to those who came before. Both her French and Moroccan grandmothers collected lace, each with their own pattern and language. Together, the two materials hold a fragility and sensibility, yet they diverge in their temporal orientation. Baby powder gestures toward an unrecoverable childhood, while lace bears the marks of duration, the two also differ in how they hold memory: one evocative and associative, the other material and inherited.

“Spiders make lace too”, she notes, “when they spin their webs.” And like the spider, she multifariously binds together textures, fictions, whispers, sources, into a single language. One shaped through her relationship with Darija (Moroccan Arabic), a language that remains somewhat obscure to her, though no less present, as she notes, “there is a way of speaking a language without speaking it.” To inhabit the sphere of a language, in other words, is to be in the presence of its absence. It is from this position, of not being able to speak Darija, that her artistic practice recognizes language as more than communication, and translation as more than transparency. A language, a culture, and a heritage may remain opaque, untranslatable and partially inaccessible, without being a limitation. For El Yousfi opacity becomes a form of sovereignty, a source of creativity and a way of celebrating her own perspective.

El Yousfi’s artistic methodology and intuition contrast the need for transparency and translateability with a poetic interconnection of sculpture, materials and words, a way toward a language, a culture, a heritage that is hers and that she is still, always, becoming. Her practice, as she puts it, is a step closer to the lifeworld of the Arabic language and its culture. And so, at the end of our conversation she returns to the words of Mahmoud Darwish, who once wrote: “I was interested in celebrating language and making it dance, as if I were working in a festival of words, images, and aesthetics, liberated from any other consideration. I wanted to free the demons, doves, and birds of Arabic.”