Kabylian Jar

This jar, like all the moulded Berber pottery throughout North Africa, was made from local earth, collected in Jijel, then moulded by hand and by scraper. This manufacturing method leaves a lot of room for variations in the jar’s shape, which can shift from a truncated cone to convex or concave curves, with multiple breaks and ridges in its lines, flexibility that is impossible with wheel turned ceramics. Berber pottery is produced and decorated exclusively by women, according to technical traditions and ancestral decorative repertories. These products are meant for domestic use (to store, prepare and serve food) in the relatively short term, due to the pottery’s fragility. This is partly because of how they are fired: the pottery is first dried in the open air, then stacked and covered with fuel (slabs of dried animal dung and plants).

This jar belongs to a collection accumulated over the years by a French doctor working in and around Jijel, where he would regularly receive thanks in the form of pottery from women whose babies he delivered, and a city planning architect who appreciated the physical and aesthetic qualities of the pottery of Kabylia. Brought back to France when Algeria was decolonized, the collection remained for a long while in the family’s flat in Paris, where it traced a history of movements and exchanges from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other over the course of the 20th century.