A Conversation with Artist Catalina Swinburn, "Devotional Landscapes," Selma Feriani Gallery, by James Scarborough
May 06, 2025
Catalina Swinburn's "Devotional Landscapes" explores the spiritual terrain of Zawiyas - Sufi sanctuaries that dot North Africa's religious landscape. Through her precise paper weavings, she turns archaeological fieldwork into art that connects physical materials with spiritual experience.
Swinburn's exhibition stands out through her skillful blend of cultural research and artistic creativity. Her sculptural works don't merely represent Zawiya sites; they embody the meditative processes inherent in both Sufi spiritual practice and traditional craftsmanship. Her collaboration with Tunisian artist Mohamed Amine Hamouda adds a layer of cultural exchange, particularly evident in their joint creation of paper from palm fibers harvested from the Oasis of Gabès.
"The Phoenix Rebirth" is especially striking. Here Swinburn weaves paper engraved with knitting and crochet patterns from local women artisans. This work exemplifies her artistic philosophy - creating links between ancient practices and modern concerns, between religious heritage and feminist reclamation. The exhibition becomes a Zawiya itself: a space that invites viewers to contemplate, turns artistic practice into devotion, and connects different cultural traditions through transformed materials.
Below follows an email conversation with Catalina Swinburn:
JS: Your exhibition explores Zawiyas as both physical locations and spiritual concepts. How did your fieldwork at these sites in Tunisia transform your understanding of the relationship between geography and spirituality?
CS: Physical locations serve as local landmarks in the urban landscape in and around Tunis, an urban spiritual constellation. Landmarks, architecture, and nomenclature keep the figures of the saints ever nearby. Each Zawiya revolves around the actions and teachings of a particular saint, whose zawiya is the locus of ritual activity. These shrines, which often house the tomb of the saint, are ubiquitous throughout the North African landscape. Saints are represented as the guardians of the territory, invisible protectors of the land and the souls. In this sense we could say that sanctuaries are part of a reflection on the territory, understood as a delimited space, a space of peace, a unit of purification, a place of mediation and communication with supernatural powers, and a cult space constantly defined and renewed by ritual practices that people have practiced for centuries. During my fieldwork visiting Zawiyas in Tunisia, I found that these places form a network across the land, like a constellation of sacred spots, woven through geography. As the scholar Nelly Amri writes in her book Zawiya et Territoire en Ifriqiya, we can see "the inscription of holiness in a proper territorial perspective." This idea fits perfectly with what I found. Spirituality is not just a feeling or idea, it is built into the land itself, shaping both the environment and the lives of the people who live around. Community visits and annual celebrations in Zawiyas and by saints' tombs became a central practice after the 12th century. These journeys created networks of sacred geography connecting distant regions through shared veneration. The 220 saint-named locations in early 20th century in Tunis testify to the profound impact of these spiritual journeys on the urban landscape. The saints of Tunisia, bearing the honorific "Sidi" or "Léla," continue to exert their pull on devotees, inspiring journeys both physical and spiritual across the sacred geography of the region.
JS: "The Phoenix Rebirth" involves paper made from palm fibers and incorporates needlework from local women artisans. Could you explain how this collaborative process reflected your artistic themes of cultural preservation and female resilience?
CS: I aim to rescue ancestral rituals related to sacred places, ancestral geography and original memory; and take them into my own exploration where the work is presented as a syncretic bricolage, as an attempt to reconcile different doctrines, a process of transculturalization, the union of the sacred and the secular. The main purpose of my work is to revalidate the place of women through history and to use my practice, of weaving from historical narratives, as a metaphor of resistance, where woven narratives are portrayed as a substitute for the silence of women throughout history. "Weaving is a symbol of female expression, a substitution of a woman's voice, and weaving can portray what words cannot say." Weaving has always been an alternative discourse and makes reference to female resilience and brings to life the undocumented role of women. Women used to weave together; it's a living tradition that is passed through time. If we go back into history, it was a space of freedom for women to express themselves among themselves and to be able to create pieces with symbolical meanings, associated with ritual offerings. I wove paper engraved with patterns from local women, bringing together their quiet, devoted craft traditions. This weaving becomes a form of remembrance of both the women's hands that created these patterns and of the sacred spaces that inspired me.
JS: Throughout your career, you've used weaving as a metaphorical form of resistance. In this exhibition, how does that practice specifically respond to the Sufi traditions you encountered during your research?
CS: In the rich tapestry of Sufism, two interrelated concepts stand out as foundational to both spiritual practice and the veneration of saints: the spiritual-physical journey "Safar" and spontaneous attraction to saints "Jadheb". I found, after completing the exhibition, that these two concepts are tightly connected to the main essence of my practice. Early Sufi movements often practiced traveling as a form of spiritual and knowledge development. Sufi travelers created enduring connections between distant regions, facilitating cultural exchange and establishing shared sacred geographies that often transcended political boundaries. That is what I intend to do with my practice of weaving, which is interlocking, embedding, placing things, times, places together. My artistic process intends to transform inanimate materials into an emotional encounter, much like how Sufism transforms the physical into the metaphysical. The exhibition itself becomes a space for reflection, inviting viewers to experience the same quietness and presence I found in the Zawiyas.
JS: Your collaboration with Mohamed Amine Hamouda represents an intersection of two independent artistic practices. What unexpected discoveries emerged from this cross-cultural dialogue that wouldn't have been possible in your solo work?
CS: Selma Feriani, the gallerist, has always believed in her space in Tunis as a platform of exchange & discussions. She always takes her own time to take artists around and show them the richness of Tunisia's heritage and contemporary practices and connect us with local figures of exceptional knowledge. We wanted to do a collaboration with Tunisian heritage. We went together to Gabes in August 2024 and met Mohamed Amine Hamouda in his Studio. I was impressed by his practice and knowledge of the materials he used, all from nature and from the Oasis of Gabes, and we decided to make a work in collaboration. His practice has many layers that find resonance with mine, and I found also the Oasis of Gabes to be a "mode of resistance." In fact, the oasis of Gabes, which counted at the end of the sixties around 1050 hectares, has now only 700 hectares and has lost a third of its area at a rate of 10 hectares lost per year. Located on a coast increasingly attractive, alongside the growing cities, these areas are drawn into accelerated urbanization dynamics that have subjected them to increasingly varied pressures, even contradictory, accelerating their degradation and abandonment. For this specific project, we created the pages of a book that hasn't existed, but that could, without words, talk about the idea of Re-Birth. It's the first time I've been able to create the pages of the book I will later dismantle, and on each page there were numerous processes involved, from collecting the leaves from the Oasis, processing them in the studio to become a new raw material, the ancient method of making the paper, tinting the paper with natural pigments from the region, and engraving them with knitted crochet from local women artisans that were the voice of the invisible words of this book.
JS: The exhibition includes sound elements that combine ritual music with the sounds of weaving. How does this sonic dimension expand the conversation between materiality and transcendence that runs through your visual work?
CS: The sonic dimension has always been part of my practice. I've always recorded in the studio the sounds of weaving, the sound of tearing the pages of the books I use to create my works. Lately, I have incorporated recording words and phrases I rescue from the pages I collect and dismantle, as vestiges of memory. I've always considered these sounds to be a crucial part of the work itself, and I always incorporate them into my displays. For this exhibition, it was crucial to have an immersive sound piece in the gallery space, because it is mainly through music that the saint's presence and capacity for intervention are actuated in the Zawiyas. The sound piece, DEVOTIONAL LANDSCAPES (available on Spotify), has 3 phases, associated with the stages of the Hadra ritual, Hizb, Shishtri and Hadra. Each of them is inspired by the global trajectory shape of the ritual and on the schematic of the layers of intensifications of the hadra ceremony and have a paper woven piece that has been created, as a sonic texture, with documents including vocal and instrumental music as well as poetry set to music found in the Medina of Tunis and in the Medina of Kairouan. The sound piece combines recordings I made in August 2024 in Tunisia during my visit to several Zawiyas during the summer festivity times, mostly recorded in the female Zawiya of Sayyda Mannubiyya, with the sounds of the making of the works in my studio: weaving of paper, books dismantling, gold leaf engraving and my voice with a narrative on my notes throughout the journey, quotes I've read in different articles and books, or discussions I've exchanged.
JS: In creating work that bridges archaeological and contemporary languages, how do you navigate the tension between honoring traditional practices and creating art that speaks to current global concerns?
CS: Probably this question is the key to the show. I found the Zawiyas to be very contemporary spiritual spaces, although they date from the 12th century, by having diverse functions that oscillate between a space of ritual trance for alleviating suffering through music, to a charity space for people in need, providing shelter and food with no distinction on anyone approaching the space. In this sense, I believe in a universal language that communicates to us all, in presence and beyond. I think there is a need to return to traditional culture, to relate in a more respectful way with nature, to focus on sustainable projects that aspire to a certain degree of transcendence; here is the choice of honoring traditional practices and connecting with ancestral knowledge and archaeology that connects with current global concerns. Turning a collapse into a work. Such is the challenge. Conceiving ruins as a condition of knowledge. The printed image itself is the condition of a ruin; through printed material, which at this point belongs to collections of discarded books. For a long time, I have devoted myself to recovering these books from the ruins of the publishing industry and converted them into a complex raw material emerging from their disappearance as objects, initiating a regressive process that obliterates the representation of the image and the letter.
JS: Your artist statement mentions "regenerating narratives" as both "a sense of urgency and a mode of resistance." Could you tell us what specific narratives you found most urgent to regenerate in Tunisia's spiritual landscape?
CS: Zawiyas are a mode of resistance themselves. Zawiyas have navigated through history, resisting centuries of adapting to different functions. I believe that, possibly, the spiritual landscape might be the one landscape that doesn't need any urgent regeneration in Tunisia. The resulting artworks of this exhibition become a visual invitation to that invisible depth that stretches along centuries of devotion. Working on Tunisian saint traditions as an inspiration operates as a kind of boundary-crosser, much like the saints themselves who were often seen as mediators between worlds. The specific narrative I wanted to focus on is how to translate this universal spirituality into artworks in front of which viewers and visitors might experience a moment of "jadheb," might find themselves unexpectedly drawn into contemplation and connections that transcend geographical, cultural, and temporal boundaries.
The show opens on Saturday, May 10 at 6PM. Tickets are available from the gallery. The Selma Feriani Gallery is located at 32 Rue Ibn Nafis, Z.I. Kheireddine 2015 La Goulette, Tunisia. For more information, click here.