Travelling South, a stained-glass piece produced in France, reflects Ouhaddou’s material-driven approach and her sensitivity to the symbolic weight carried by specific materials. The work emerges from an exploration of the history of glass in and around the Mediterranean, grounded in research that moves between history and archaeology. Her use of glass is rooted in a quasi-archaeological investigation into the circulation of this material, particularly in relation to Morocco’s political and commercial history, as well as the evolution of life and decorative vocabulary in the medinas. The geopolitics of craftsmanship lies at the core of her practice. For Ouhaddou, it becomes a site of deconstruction, where the artist superimposes history, archaeology, anthropology, and economics. Within this context, stained glass becomes both material and language. The stained-glass window embodies a vernacular vocabulary through its shapes and colours, as well as through the process of its making: the cutting of glass into geometric forms and their careful insertion into specific frameworks to produce a composition. From the initial drawing to the final work, Ouhaddou engages with the technique of stained glass and its Moroccan particularities. At the same time, the work reflects the artist’s reflections on language. Ouhaddou noticed that her parents often approach words not as fixed linguistic units but as constellations of signs and forms from which meaning is inferred. For the artist, orality has historically predominated over writing. In response, the artist develops a reinvented visual alphabet; a personal system of signs that exceeds linguistic boundaries and proposes a form of writing beyond borders.

In Travelling South, this visual language blends with memory and movement. The work emerges from a recurring recollection in the artist’s life: journeys toward the south, whether by train or by boat. Always toward the south, either the south of France or the south of Morocco. What is evoked is less a specific place than a direction, a movement of descent toward warmth and light. Through stained glass, Ouhaddou translates the rhythm of travel: the shifting landscapes glimpsed through a window, the quiet in-between space of transition, and the suspended temporality of passage. These fleeting perceptions are suspended in colour and form, where geometric abstraction, light, and transparency transform memory into a luminous landscape of movement.