Landscape’s Portrait, 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 Landscape’s Portrait, landscapes are reconstructed from memory and translated into the artist’s own abstract visual language. These are often places or fleeting images she was unable to photograph; moments that remain only as sensations. From these residual impressions, Ouhaddou recreates landscapes through glass, allowing the material to hold what was never captured and to give form to memory through light, colour, and transparency. The compositions bring together geometric abstraction, colour, calligraphic gestures, and light, forming scenes that oscillate between landscape and script.

Within these stained-glass works, the viewer is invited to read through sensation rather than through language: to identify shapes, perceive the musicality of lines, and accept the possibility of getting lost within the composition.