Great-grandmother’s Tattoos, 2025

230 x 150 cm

Digital illustration printed on cotton, hand-sewn, viscose fringes, hand-painted and carved wooden beam, and sewn by Jonas Jönsssn.

This rug presents a fabulative illustration of my great-grandmother as a young woman in Raqqa, Syria. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, the work seeks to reconstruct a visual and cultural memory that is at risk of erasure due to globalization and cultural homogenization. The symbols and decorations along the rug’s border are derived from the tattoos that once adorned her body—marks worn by Bedouin women as forms of identity, memory, and resistance.

As Bedouins have historically lacked access to conventional archival systems, this project creates alternative archives through artistic fabulation. It stands as a tribute to the women who carried their histories on their skin and offers a decolonial counter-image to dominant representations of Bedouin culture. Hand-sewn by Jonas Jönsson, the rug resists forgetting by reviving traditions that colonial narratives have reduced to static artifacts of the past.