Artist Visit to PennState University

April 2025.

 

In preparation for this trip, I invited Saharawi women from Samara Camp to collaborate on this project. The clothes are called Melhfas in Hassanya, and the women contributed 14 Melhfas to be sewn together to make a Saharawi nomadic tent that will travel to different places in the US. 

 

March 30th, 2025 

Trip: Barcelona to New York 

45 minute drive  to Ann Holt’s home in Long Island, NY.

 

March 31st, 2025

5 hours drive to State College, Pennsylvania.

April 1st, 2025

PennState University, campus tour with Beatrice Atencah, visiting SoVA, the School of Visual Arts’ different spaces; the studios, the gallery and the exhibitions.

11:30 am – 12:30 pm; Meeting the SoVA Director, Staff & Faculty. 

 

April 2nd, 2025

1:30 pm – 3:00 pm; Preparations for the lecture at Foster Auditorium (Pattee Library)

3:00pm – 4:30pm; Anderson Endowed Lecture Series 

(1 hr + Q & A 30mins) recorded here: https://youtu.be/vKm4yGbSigQ?si=2LGt98Fi-UG-u3iV

Welcome + Anderson Lecture History (Beatrice Atencah)

Speaker Introduction by Prof Ann Holt

 

April 3rd, 2025

Meeting the PhD students of Art Education.

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Studio Visits in the School of Visual Arts campus. 

 

10:20 am – 10:50 am , Art Cottage Building

Meeting with Pin-Hsuan Tseng, a PhD Candidate in Art Education developing her project around a yellow tent that she uses to explore political and social issues certain Asian people experience upon arrival in the US. The tent itself is a diary where she sketches, draws and collages stories, ideas and encounters. 

She introduced the research project and we put up the tent, other visitors joined us and started to listen and experience the tent. 

 

11:00 – 11:30, Patterson Building 

 

Meeting with Grace Hampton, Professor Emerita of Studio Art, Art Education, Integrative Arts, and African Studies. Grace had attended my lecture the day before and wanted to connect and discuss. It was amazing to meet her in her office and be able to exchange with her about some of the topics I had covered in my lecture. She was interested to hear more about the artistic practices in the Saharawi community and the indigenous knowledge of the Sahrawi. Grace has worked on exchange programs with Ghana and is in the process of putting together a conference involving participants from Ghana and other parts of the world. It was absolutely wonderful to hear about her role in the arts field and the work she did at PennState but also in DC and other places.

 

11:40 – 12:20 Visual Arts Building 

 

Meeting with Liz Krick at her studio. Liz is working on an interesting project in printmaking 

 

Liz had her Thesis Exhibition “Remnants” on at the Zoller Gallery, and I had the chance to stop by and see it with director Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead. Liz Krick’s work explores the environmental impact of industrialization. Her multimedia prints combine industrial waste materials with traditional media and natural imagery to bring viewers into a meditative space for considering our interconnection with nature. Turning toxic waste sediments into art pigments and colors was absolutely fascinating but also quite disturbing, but I guess it is important that artists are also working with materials and processes that can disrupt established notions and ideas of what art can be. 

 

13:55 – 14:25 

Meeting with Robert Botchway (Treyy) at his studio in the Ceramics Annex.

Treyy is a sculptor and a musician exploring entangled social and personal histories through various art practices. “His exhibition at the HUB Gallery delves into the intricate relationship between emotion and musical expression by blending fragments of musical instruments with abstract ceramic sculptures. Botchway’s hybrid forms evoke the familiarity of traditional instruments while pushing into uncharted territory, challenging perceptions of both sound and form in deeply personal ways” HUB gallery curated text. The conversation with Treyy was so inspiring. Seeing how he brings together elements from music instruments and sculpture opened a bit of a window for me to have a glimpse of the depths of his work. 

 

14:35 – 15:05

Visual Arts Building, Sculpture. 

Meeting with Debra Fleury. Debra was preparing for her exhibition coming up next after Liz Krick at the gallery “felt, but unseen” and I had the chance to see the sculptures she was working on. The wax materials, fabric and wire were fascinating to see up close.

 

15:15 – 15:45 Patterson Building 

Meeting with the students of Ann Holt. 

After the introduction by Ann, I had the chance to share with the students more about my art practice in Motif Art Studio. Some of the students had already attended the Anderson lecture and had some questions that opened more discussions and reflections.

15:55 – 16:25 The Art Cottage building.

Meeting with Karen keifer-boyd class. Karen was discussing a number of examples of art projects responding to social and environmental changes when I came in. She kindly invited me to present myself to the class and tell about my work. I shared a number of projects and collaborations in the refugee camps and internationally. The students had some questions and we were able to reflect on the phosphorus impact on the agricultural sector. 

 

April 4th, 2025

Meeting Felecia Davis, Stuckeman School of Architecture, Felecia is an award winning architect and designer that Ann Holt introduced me to. We walked to the Stuckeman Building to meet her. She took us to the lab where she works and showed us around. They have different projects going on. One of her recent projects is about a solar fiber tension structure shade prototype, a solar tent if you like. The photovoltaic fibers are woven with other materials as a structure. The project is still being developed but it sounded very promising in the future. The materials are still expensive. We jokingly noted that it would be the one million dollar tent! We met Felecia as we are working on putting together a Sahrawi tent and thought that it’d be interesting to talk to her. Felecia was so generous she introduced us to her colleague and fellow architect Yasmine Abbas. We instantly felt welcomed and invited. They both showed us around the amazing spaces of the School of Architecture. There were many students working on their projects or studying in different corners. There were also a lot of miniature buildings, sketch tables, and a gazillion different materials, from wood to felt, to metal to plastic and everything else you can think of. After the walk through the school space, Yasmine took us to the Immersive Environments Lab, or simply, the IEL, which is a school facility designated to immersive 3D projection technology with high tech installation. They were so kind as to invite us to use the space to build our tent or 3D scan it or anything else we wished to do. The invitation was absolutely wonderful and we soon planned our daily visits to the IEL to work on the Saharawi Community Art Tent. The IEL will also be one of the exhibition spaces where we will assemble the tent and exhibit it. 

 

April 5-7th, 2025

Return to the house in Long Island, NY. Cindy Maguire and Rob McCallum from Arts Action Group came to visit and spend the weekend with us in Long Island. Arts Action Group had visited the Saharawi refugee camps a couple of times with different members, that’s how we met. We have also collaborated on different projects in the past. My relationship with Cindy and Rob was so meaningful and important and we stayed in touch for over ten years, mostly online and over Zoom and social media. Cindy had invited me during Covid to contribute a chapter to Arts and Culture in Global Development Practice, a book she co-edited with Ann Holt and was published by Routledge. And here we are, meeting in person after all of those years of remote collaborations and discussions. It felt surreal but it was a warm moment of reconnection and reunion.

 

April 8th, 2025

Return to State College.

 

13:00 -15:00

Today we will be at the Immersive Environments Lab in the Stuckeman Building of Architecture and we will be bringing the fabrics of the tent. We will check them out and start the first steps of designing and putting together the tent.  Perhaps we will be doing a bit of sewing and will also check the technology of the immersive 3D projection to see ways of scanning the interior space of the Saharawi tent whether here or in the camps and play with other ways of scanning people in these green screen and see ways of experiencing this interactive method with the help of architects and designers and artists Felicia Davis will probably at some point bring some other participants to be part of sewing and putting together the tent and we will be taking it to other places like the Student Farm on Earth Day.

 

15:00 – 16:30

Co-teaching with Ann Holt a class on Interpreting Art Experiences and art practices and the process of starting from archives to visuals. The students share about the creative response in relation to their research and the essays they wrote. Some students share about their projects, and how they are starting from materials, stories and realities they live/experience and then turn them into a creative work, visual or sound based work. Turning books into sculptures, turning fabric into painting and much more. The discussion also involved other creative methods such as story maps, connecting places, stories and other materials that can help with visualizing archives. Students used historical sites, family pictures and materials. They put them side by side in different ways to create art. One student was asking what a church means as a communal space. The social, aesthetic and the architecture of the place tell so much about how we interact with them.

 

Another way could be in the form of curating a digital exhibition using the archival materials, putting them together in some way and arranging the photographs next to each other could lead to a string of ideas, or a poem, a journey of how you tie these things together. It doesn’t have to be super literal.  

 

Family tree, lost histories and passage connects to people who are displaced or trying to make home. An artist can gather those photographs in one case and make a new work. I’ve talked to somebody whose family is going through challenges but didn’t carry photographs because if they got to the border and there were photographs it would make it look like they’re trying to leave or something and they’re not coming back, and that would put their family members in danger or something like that, so there’s these like many reasons why you know there’s a piece of books you know and so you could play with this kinds of objects that might be about that and it’s in that story is still a story that is historical but it’s also thinking about it like those kinds of materials, it was emotions of fracture.

 

During this class, we had a chance to present Nomadic Seeds, the collaboration with Pekka Niskanen, and I had a chance to read a poem from the book, and talk about the research project behind it. We invited the students to respond to the poem, the visuals and the text in the book with their own interpretations. The visuals were really interesting and thought provoking.

 

14:00

I was invited to meet Felicia Davis’s class on the 4th floor Stuckeman Building where I stopped by for a short introduction and interaction with the students of architecture. I had the chance to see some of the projects there developing at the moment. 

6:30 pm

R U Curious? Artist Book Talk Schlow Memorial Library Nomadic Seeds 

 

We had a lovely small circle of people attending and I had the chance to pass around a couple of physical copies of Nomadic Seeds co-authored with Pekka Niskanen. It was also an opportunity for me as a visual artist to show different visual materials to help contextualize the presentation and topic. Nomadic Seeds is an artist book we wrote during Covid as a response to the lockdown. It was an artistic intervention to build connections between Saharawi families and other farmers and practitioners around the world in order to share garden and seed stories and knowledges.

 

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Return to Long Island and visit to NYC.

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April 07th, 2025

Meeting with Mel Chin in NYC.

 

Mel Chin visited the Sahrawi refugee camps over ten years ago. We collaborated on an art project designing the Sahrawi future currency. A conceptual and socially engaged art that involved collective and participatory design of the Sahrawi currency. The currency would not be backed by oil or gold but by the power of the sun. The project started in ARTifariti festival and was showcased at the ROM. It was a special moment to revisit that project and reflect on the different current political and cultural changes we are all going through locally and globally. 

Mel was so generous with his time with us, his comments and analyses are very important for me as an artist. His wisdom is something I always cherished. As we talk and share about our experiences, he casually said 

“These are difficult times but the most times to be active”. My heart was pounding, I wanted to take a note, but then I didn’t want to interrupt this beautiful conversation. I am happy to quote Mel and to take this piece of wisdom with me back home. 

 

April 8th, 2025

10:30 

The Immersive Environments Lab, stockman Building PennState University.

Sewing the tent parts, others join us to help.

 

———–

 

Discussion with Felisha Davis about setting up the tent in a new context requiring a different set up. The wooden sticks need to be fixed to the ground or weighed down with buckets filled with sand or stones. Collapsible water bags?

 

Yasmine Abbas will help us project a desert landscape or the interior of Motif Art Studio in the 3D Immersive Environments Lab space. Thoughts to explore how to bring something to the Immersive Lab. 

 

Ann Holt is inviting her students to exhibit their body maps art, which involve materials, body shapes and movements that the students had created in pairs. 

 

April 12th, 2025

Ma’s House Studio, Shinnecock Nation, NY

 

We drove to Shinnecock Nation, it’s my first time to enter a land where the indigenous people are living. At the entrance of the nation, I see a gate, or some sort of a stop. We found our way to Ma’s House, and were greeted by Jeremy Dennis, the artist and director of the BIPAC art residence. We are invited to perform a Saharawi Tea ritual Dialogues on Nomadic Knowledges. Once inside the house, we met different people from the residence. By then, we have not finished the tent, the tent cannot be set up inside the residence, but we brought it so we can sit on it while we perform the tea ceremony. The tent was so colorful, the participants loved sitting down and engaged in the conversation.

 

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April 14th, 2025

On-line / Adelphi University 

 

Lecture at Adelphi University NYC, 

Invited by Prof Devin Thornburg for the Advanced Psychology and Social Change course he is teaching. A series of lectures presented by different international artists and scholars from South Africa, Western Sahara, Chile and Vietnam.

 

I gave a brief introduction to the situation of the Saharawi refugee camps to contextualize my lecture, then I introduced Motif Art Studio and the art practices and projects we are developing there. 

I then went on to talk about the farming practices in Samara Camp and how they are bringing big change to our community. The family gardens were developed by Sahrawi agricultural engineer and Permaculture designer Taleb Brahim and the families are developing these gardens in different ways. The gardens I am following are also featured in my film DESERT PHOSfate. 

 

14:00

 

Ann and I took a long walk in the forest following these little paths between the trees. We can see deer tracks, turkeys, squirrels, swans and other birds. The forest is slowly starting to bloom. Many branches still don’t have leaves on them, against the sky, their silhouette is absolutely fascinating. The interwoven branches, the different shapes are just otherworldly to me. I stopped to take many photos of these branch patterns and shapes. We kept walking until we reached the bay. Long Island has a beautiful bay area separating the land from the Atlantic Ocean. 

 

April 16th, 2025

8:40

Stuckeman Architecture Building 

 

We are finishing the last parts of the tent. We went to the woodshop and Mark helped cut the PVC pipes which we used to make the center pole for the tent, the PVC looks ugly so we wraped it with pieces of fabric from the tent, but it’s like, so we used it and made a threaded connection in the middle to make it easy for us to connect and disconnect when travelling. 

 

12 pm – 1:30 pm

 

April 16th, 2025

Sister Garden Exchange: Living Arts and Pedagogy.

Borland Project Space College of Arts and Architecture- 

Sustainability Council  Teaching and Learning Roundtable. 

 

In this session we introduced our methods of collaboration, teaching and learning through the garden exchanges as ways of knowing. 

Our collaboration started during Covid with Ann Holt and Cindy Maguire from Arts Action Group inviting me to contribute a chapter to their edited book Arts and Culture in Global Development Practice. The conversations and exchanges led to more invitations to interact with the students at PennState, the exchange involved building connections between students from PennState and the students at Almasar Library in Samara camp. The PennState students created books with seeded paper which travelled to the camps. In response, the students at Almasar Library created their own books from paper and tent fabric and other materials and I was able to bring them with me to the US. The books were exhibited at the Sustainability Council Teaching and Learning Roundtable. 

The sisters garden exchange is an ongoing project exploring these questions of experiencing what is a garden? There were many moments when we were in the summer and it was extremely hot, and there were no physical gardens but we were talking about the garden, envisioning a garden, we were exploring a moment of becoming, something that is not yet there but it’s also happening around us. It’s a way to sense the garden and interpret it as a place of growth, a place of constant becoming.

 

14:30 

Lecture at Apocalyptic Geographies course by Mark Ortiz

In this lecture, I was able to share with the geography students what it feels to live in the desert. I used visuals from life in the camps to show them different aspects of life. I shared photos of the sandstorms we experienced in the desert. The sandstorm can be scary and dangerous , but they are very important for the global ecosystem. Those sandstorms carry huge amounts of phosphorus, cross the Atlantic ocean and land in the Amazon basin, the Amazon depends on the desert to exist. I wanted to just open a discussion about the desert. I wanted to challenge this stereotype that the desert is empty and lifeless. So it was important to bring up such stories. There were many questions about water and how to grow the gardens, so we had to explain the basics of living in a refugee camp. 

 

13:30 

 

Studio visit 

 

Meeting the Architecture students with Felicia Davis. 

The students shared with me their processes of creating their different projects.

 

15:30 

 

Guest speaker for the course, Art and Social Change Course with Prof. Cindy Maguire, Adelphi University, NY.

 

Course Description: There is a growing overlap between socially engaged art and cultural practices generated by social movements globally including environmentalism, disability awareness, Black Lives Matter, Queer movements and more. Explore the work of radical collectives, community artists, and contemporary troublemakers whose art operates as storytelling, creative placemaking and participatory art.

 

My talk highlighted different subjects such as:

My art practice and the establishment of Motif Art Studio. 

Farming as a studio practice 

Multi sensorial experience in the garden as ways of knowing 

The collective knowing in the community 

The process and the end product 

The transformation from nomadic to settling in refugee camps 

What we know, how we behave and act makes the world. 

World making 

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Palmer Museum and the conversation with Ann about objects from Africa displayed in different museums in the West with references to people in West Africa and very little mentions of the names of the artists/artisans who made them. The objects were probably not meat as art works, possibly as everyday objects for food, parts of homes and so on … 

 

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10:00

Visiting The student farm 

 

Seeing the gardens 

Seeing the kale flowers and seeds. 

Planting blackberries 

 

I have joined the student farm online a couple of times in the past, it was a very special moment for me to meet them in person. 

 

We are collaborating with the student farm to bring the Sahrawi Community Art Tent to the Earth Day activities, so part of the visit was also to discuss logistics of setting up the tent, adapting to the weather conditions of the day. The tent cannot be set up during the rain or thunderstorm. 

 

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April 18th, 2025

13:00

 

Caretelling Workshop in the Capacities of Care exhibition at HUB Robeson Art Alley

Sahrawi Tea Dialogues: Cultivating and Sharing Nomadic Garden Knowledge

 

As part of this workshop, Mohamed Sleiman Labat & Ann Holt are installing a Saharawi nomadic tent woven from the garments of displaced women, and witness a living expression of resilience and care. As part of the Caretelling Workshop Series, this gathering invites participants into a space of storytelling, nomadic wisdom, and shared tea.

The installation includes co-exhibiting with PSU Student Farm who brought different plants exhibited around the tent. The students also took part in building the tent, some of them also participated in sewing parts of the tent. 

When the tent was up, we invited the participants to take part in the tea ceremony. We sat in a circle and I started preparing the tea, telling about life in the desert and inviting others to the conversation around the issues that we face in the desert and they also impact the world. 

 

The conversations slowly waived through the topics allowing moments of reflection and intervention. 

 

Thank you Ann, Sarah, Robert, Ayinna, Sylvie, Tennaza, Jamy, Tawsif and Bola. 

———-

Art education course on interpretation of art experiences 

Course description of Ann Holt 

 

April 21st, 2025

PAC MOCA, LI

Patchogue Art Council,

Museum of Contemporary Art, Long Island 

 

Plaza Cinema Media Arts Center.

 

We arrived at MoCA and together with others we started to set up the Saharawi community art tent inside the center. When the tent was up, we sat down inside the tent and performed the Sahrawi tea ceremony. We use the tent space and the tea ceremony as a space for dialogue and knowledge exchange from the Sahrawi people. Much of the knowledge was new to many of the participants, but they also commented and asked questions that lead the discussion to different areas. 

 

Interesting questions from some of the participants: 

 

When you record and interview the elderly in your community, do you feel pressured or do you feel honored? 

 

Do you ever feel angry and how do you process all the frustration you and your community experience?

 

Not easy to answer, but very interesting…

 

At this meeting I met someone from International Cities of Peace, who attended the tea ceremony and enjoyed it. She now would like Smara Camp to join this coalition of cities around the world. Fun fact: International Cities of Peace start in Patchogue Long Island, where we are. 

 

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April 22nd, 2025

 

Installing the exhibition at the Immersive Environments Lab. The exhibition includes a number of displays and interactive art works. The first part of the exhibition at the entrance of the Immersive Lab are the books from Almasar Library students exhibited on tables together with copies of Nomadic Seeds book by Mohamed Sleiman Labat and a copy of Arts and Culture in Global Development Practice credited by Cindy Maguire and Ann Holt. The next part of the exhibition is the 360 projection of the e-tent scans in different places from the tent scan at PAC MOCA LI and the scan from the Immersive Lab. Facing the 360 projection is a display of a number of objects and materials from the process of making the tent such as the drawings and sketches, the sewing machines and other objects and fabrics. The exhibition also includes a projection of visuals from the Sahrawi refugee camps. Besides the 360 projection, the Sahrawi community art tent is installed and lit from above by ceiling warm lights. 

 

April 23rd, 2025

 

Screening the film DESERT PHOSfate as part of PSU Sustainability Summit, at the Flux Theater at the HUB Robeson followed by Q&A with Sylvie Alexander and Rebecca Durbin. 

 

April 24, 2025

10:00 Immersive Environments Lab

 

Today I met with Dean Stephen Carpenter for a conversation in the Saharawi community art tent. We sat down to talk about a project he worked on about water filtration systems from clay, saw dust and other materials. The conversation and exchange were absolutely wonderful and we are developing something in the future.

The rest of the day included:

The exhibition at the Immersive Environments Lab 

The conversation with the architects and students of architecture. 

Scanning the tent with 3D technology for the immersive projection. 

 

A number of architecture students stopped by for a conversation about the tent structure. They had a lot of questions regarding the different tent features and functions.

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14:00

sitting down for a conversation with Yasmine Abbas about the notions of nomadic living. The conversation is recorded and it will be part of a future colaboration. Yasmin is an architect, and she is interested in the notion of new nomads and digital nomads. I come from a community with long traditions of nomadic ways of living, our understanding of nomadism overlaps in many areas. The conversation weaves through those notions and interpretations.

 

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May 25th, 2025

Earth Day at the PSU Student Farm 

 

The event started with a nomadic procession through the Arboretum, and all the way to the student farm. We carried the tent and followed green paths until we were close to the student farm then we joined the main road.

At the Earth Day event , we set up the tent at the students farm, performing a Sahrawi tea ceremony and inviting the visitors to sit down and slow down. There were many participants from students of engineering, to poets and farmers, to mushroom experts and many more. 

 

April 26th, 2025.

We drove back to Long Island NY. We rested and woke up the next morning and spent some time exchanging relaxed conversations over coffee and food. There was one more thing that I had to do before I took off. I had to play football with Kaly. Kaly is the best dog football player I have ever met and again she bit me, left out of breath, I had to give up. A moment to catch my breath and take a last family group photo before Ann and her husband Hissein drove me to the airport. I am now sitting in the airplane editing this journal as the echoes of the conversations were still fresh. It’s been an absolutely wonderful visit. 

Thanks to everyone involved in the journey, thanks to those of you I have met and could not remember your names, you are many and wonderful, the texts here are only reflections on the many beautiful moments i got to spend with you. 

End of this issue. Other issues are available on the journal webpage. 

Disclaimer: 

Reflections, impressions and comments expressed in this journal are the artist’s views and interpretations. They don’t necessarily reflect the opinion of the people and institutions visited by the artist. The artist is committed to conveying the notions of those encounters as accurately as possible, but if those who are mentioned here think otherwise, I am happy to correct any misunderstanding resulting from misquotation or misinterpretation of those encounters. For any corrections and clarification, please contact us here: contact@motifartstudio.com

encounters Journal is published by Motif Art Studio. Click here to access the other issues.

 

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