Technikart met with Sara Ouhaddou, the grand laureate of the BNP Paribas Banque Privée award: a look at the French scene, awarded as part of Art Paris.

This interview offers a unique insight into Sara Ouhaddou’s artistic journey and the ideas that shape her work. Beyond questions of craft and heritage, Sara speaks about language, transmission, and the ways in which objects can carry stories, memories, and systems of knowledge. Through long-term collaborations with artisans, field research, and encounters with oral traditions, Sara explores how gestures, materials, and forms can become languages in themselves. Her practice questions the histories surrounding craftsmanship while creating new spaces for exchange, learning, and collective knowledge. 

One of the key ideas emerging from the conversation is her understanding of collaboration as an active process of reciprocity: not simply preserving existing techniques, but developing new tools and possibilities through dialogue. The interview also sheds light on the origins of her invented alphabets, which emerge from collected voices and stories, transforming oral histories into visual and material forms.

Partout dans le monde, les objets sont des formes de langage.”
“Everywhere in the world, objects are forms of language.”