Tunis: How a Farming Village Became an Internationally Renowned Artisan Hub

Just one hour southwest of the Pyramids of Giza lies El Fayoum, a magical oasis in the Egyptian desert. With its lush palm trees, blue lakes, and fertile land, Egypt’s biggest oasis has enchanted people for thousands of years.

Small villages and ancient archeological sites are peppered throughout the countryside of El Fayoum where Arabs and Bedouins, many of whom have family ties to Libya, traditionally worked the farmland.

“Before I went to pottery school, I used to just play with clay as a child,” says Ibrahim Samir, a potter and ceramic artist in Tunis village, El Fayoum. “I think people do that all over the world. There’s mud everywhere and children start making little shapes in the form of their animals.”

Samir witnessed and took part in the evolution of his home, Tunis, once a small farming village unknown to all but its neighbors, into an internationally renowned artisan community.

It all began in the 1980s when Swiss potter Evelyne Porret — who had moved to Tunis with her first husband, the Egyptian poet Sayed Hegab — returned with her second husband Michel Pastore who was also a potter. They opened a pottery school and began teaching the children in the village how to craft shapes with clay instead of mud, taking inspiration from an art center in the outskirts of Cairo that taught children traditional weaving and believed that there was an artist in every child.

The training was free and if a student sold their work, they would be paid a third of the price while the rest went to covering the costs of materials. Slowly, the young potters of Tunis began hosting exhibitions, first in El Fayoum, then across Egypt, and eventually in Europe and the Arab world.

Many went on to perfect their craft and opened their own pottery studios, making trays, teapots, tiles, and vases the canvases on which they would paint their world. Stepping into a typical pottery workshop in Tunis means seeing the donkeys of the fields drawn onto large plates or offering their clay heads as coat hangers. Palm trees decorate bowls and mugs, birds fly across trays, cats adorn soap holders, and village girls smile in mirror frames.

While there is no set curriculum, children usually start at the age of nine and study for six to seven years. Samir was one of these students and later became Porret’s assistant for fifteen years. Now, he has his own workshop next to the pottery school where he teaches the next generation.

“The first thing I teach them is that they have to love each other and work well as a group,” he shares, walking around his workshop and explaining each section. “Then, I make sure they respect the system we have to uphold in order to keep the workshop clean and organized. Third, they learn to respect time. If we start at 9:00 a.m. and they show up at 09:01, I tell them to go back to bed.”

Only when the students have mastered these initial rules can the artmaking begin. “No mind, no eyes,” says Samir with a mysterious smile and a twinkle in his eye. “Do you understand? Everything takes time and practice. You need to feel the clay. You need to touch it with your hands.”

More concretely, he and others like him pass on the knowledge of how to prepare the clay, shape and mold it, decorate and glaze it, build a kiln, fire the clay, and go with the flow of what emerges at the end. “I love pottery, because I can never know how it will come out,” he smiles. “With the manual oven, even if I use the same technique, I can never know which color and shape will come out in the end. No two creations are the same and nothing can ever be recreated.”

Samir stresses that the most important aspect of teaching art is to make sure the students retain their unique instinct and trust their intuition. “Your work is good the way you do it and my work is good the way I do it,” he says with conviction.

As an artist, he is particularly known for two motifs: large plates that show village girls as he remembers them before Tunis became more international and modernized, and a collection of the faces of Tunis.

“The village is changing,” he explains. “In the past, nobody wore pants and shirts. Everyone wore jalabiyas and worked in the field together. I want to keep that memory alive in my drawings.” One of his plates is on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The walls of his workshop are adorned with big round mirrors and plates that he proudly says he would never sell. As he goes into the details of the various techniques used to create certain pieces, his love for each piece becomes clear.

While he talks, young children walk in and out of the workshop, arranging their works-in-progress and tidying up. Every student has their own shelf to showcase their creations, encouraging them to believe in their art and explore creativity born of and nurtured by the desert lands around them. Annually, around 2000 foreigners travel to Tunis to learn its traditional pottery techniques, and every visit promises new discoveries, colors and motifs.

Throughout the interview, Samir repeats that, “Life is the biggest school. I am always studying, and pottery is like the world.”