le septième jour - l’arbre de vie. the alchemy of spirts - postritual reflexion

le septième jour is a two-part editorial project exploring the intersection of ritual, memory, and image-making. Developed between France and Morocco, it consists of a photographic book and a detachable research pamphlet titiled the alchemy of spirits – postritual reflexion. The project draws from Gnawa ceremonies - ancestral, spiritual, and healing practices rooted in the history of slavery and resistance in North Africa - and questions how ritual can inform contemporary artistic methodologies without being appropriated or aestheticised.

The photographs are a mix of images produced without a camera, using fire, silver gelatin, and microscopic imagery of ritual materials. Resisting documentation, they are traces, material residues, of an experience that cannot be shown directly. Fire, leather, and organic matter are approached not as symbols, but as vectors of transformation. This work is concerned with what images can hold of the invisible, and how they might carry, rather than represent, spiritual presence.

The accompanying text, written after attending a private Gnawa ceremony in Fez, addresses and questions the position of the artist-researcher caught between cultural distance and filial belonging. Drawing on anthropology, postcolonial theory, and critiques of the Western art canon, the pamphlet explores how ritual challenges the modern notion of authorship, and how spiritual practices- often dismissed or exoticised - can open alternative ways of thinking about artistic transmission, community, and the sacred.

le septième jour is not an attempt to reproduce ritual, but to stay with its echo - its alchemical logic, its opacity, and its power to resist commodification.

2023–2024
Photographic book + detachable research pamphlet
Edition of 2 copies

Silver gelatin fire-exposed silver prints
Microscopic photography

Hand-stitched book, traditional bindings
Printed by Bookworks, London, UK
Pamphlet: The Alchemy of Spirits – Postritual Reflexion
Textual research on Gnawa rituals, oral knowledge, spirituality and the politics of display
(English)

éléonore piret