Asma Ben Aissa develops a sculptural practice that explores the relationships between landscape, architecture, and memory through textiles. Her works take shape from a close attention to the structures that organize territories—whether built, natural, or social—and to the silent narratives that accumulate there over time. By employing thread, fabric, and fabrication techniques as tools of construction rather than mere mediums, she elaborates a plastic language in which material becomes a space of thought.
Her work envisions textiles as a soft architecture: a structure capable of articulating notions of support, circulation, tension, and repair. The gestures of weaving, knotting, assembling, or suspending do not merely refer to artisanal know-how; they constitute the very principles by which her works are built. Each piece develops as a system in which the relationships between elements matter more than the forms they produce, giving rise to a reflection on the ways in which territories, communities, and memories are woven into one another.
At the intersection of sculpture, installation, and wall-based work, her practice engages with forms of dwelling in their broadest sense. Architecture appears here less as an object than as a process: a way of occupying a space, inscribing uses within it, and leaving traces behind. The landscapes she summons are never representations; they are conceived as accumulations of material strata, vernacular gestures, circulations, and transformations that shape places as much as they shape those who inhabit them.
Her research is grounded in an observation of artisanal techniques, local materials, and vernacular constructions—not in order to produce a heritage-based or nostalgic reading, but to question their capacity to carry knowledge, modes of organization, and histories that are often absent from official narratives. By reactivating these constructive logics within a contemporary vocabulary, Asma Ben Aissa highlights the ways in which knowledge circulates, transforms, and persists through materials.
The tension between fragility and resistance runs throughout her entire body of work. The textile structures she composes seem at once precarious and load-bearing, open and protective, suspended between disappearance and permanence. They invite us to consider landscape as a material in constant reconfiguration, where each transformation retains the traces of what preceded it. Time here is less linear than stratified, inscribed in the thickness of materials as much as in the gestures that activate them.
This research has recently unfolded within several international residencies, notably at Atelier by Selma Feriani in Tunis, at Intermix Residency: Art & Fashion Reimagined in Saudi Arabia, at Gasworks in London, and then at the Fondation Fiminco in Paris, where she is currently developing a new body of work. In 2024, she presented her first solo exhibition with Blue Wind Project, affirming a practice situated at the crossroads of architectural thought and material cultures.
Asma Ben Aissa's work has been shown in institutions, art centers, and galleries in Tunisia, France, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. Laureate of the First Prize at the Chouftouhonna International Feminist Art Festival (2017), the Culture Solidaire program of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation (2020), and the TGM Gallery Young Artists Prize (2023), her work now belongs to several international public and private collections.