Mapuche ethnic adornment is the great unknown for lovers of ethnic jewelry. Being a silversmith work without major technical challenges, it has great aesthetic strength for the simplicity of its shapes and the great originality of its designs. The Mapuche people live on the Andes Mountains, straddling Argentina and Chile, between the Aconcagua River and Chiloé Island. Its inhabitants are very wedded to their land and their customs, and have a rich cosmology that focuses its principles in their attachment to ancestral territories, then embodied in everyday objects such as ceramics, textiles and jewellery. It is also the people who resisted three and half centuries of conquest, first by Spanish invader, and then by the Chilean colonization.   [...]

Skhab scented necklaces There’s a type of adornment in Northern Africa that is well known in all Maghreb: the scented beads necklace, called “Skhab”, which has a symbolic and ritual meaning, due to the perfume it exhaled. It is mainly used in Algeria and Tunisia, while in Morrocco, the used of cloves for the same purposes is more extended. The origin of these necklaces is not clear. Some researchers claim it to be of Berber origin (P. Eudel), while others think that they might have come with the Arab invasion. The used of these perfumed necklaces is widespread in rural Algeria and Tunisia, but it’s also well known in big cities, where women can buy them from jewelry [...]

BERBER WOMEN OF MOROCCO   I’ve visited this week this magnificent exhibition in the Yves Saint-Laurent Foundation located in Paris, not far from the Quai Branly Museum. The quality of the jewels exhibited is amazing, items which are impossible to see on the market anymore.  A big part of them are from the own collection of Yves Saint Laurent and normally on display at the Berber Museum at the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakesh, a city he loved and visited many times from the 60’s, even before it was on the tourist route of many low-cost air companies. The exhibition is centered on different issues related to the daily lives of Berber women and around their specific skills in [...]