Of French and Tuareg origins, writer and scholar Maïa Tellit Hawad’s research explores imaginaries of the Sahara in French Africanist studies. Her focus is the intersection of spatial, racial and extractivist dynamics in the region’s contemporary administration. For Tenelé (2025), 48 Tuareg women of Aïr (Central Sahara) articulate on the surfaces of tabarde [blankets] and iselas [saddlecloths]— objects of nomadic daily life and female textile art— individual and collective responses to the questions, ‘what is our land?’ and ‘how has it changed?’. Watch this Artist in Focus to see how the ensuing work engages the possibilities of cartographic repair and Indigenous counter-archives in a violent context of accelerated territorial dispossession, intensive mining and military confinement in the Sahara. The embroidered works reveal the individual women’s practices and visions of the territory. Each piece is also connected to the others, forming an extended weft, an alternative regional textile map wherein intimate and collective markers of an inhabited, projected and signified desert emerge; a bundle of affective weavings of the territory to stitch and patch up a disarticulated geography. 

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Director - Magdi Emad

Camera Operators - @ward helal, @shefeek_sha_nk, @alialfadly1  

Editor - Magdi Emad

Sound Design - @unnikrishnan.sb  

Production Manager - @dimzyb  

Assistant Director - @unnikrishnan.sb