Layering and tr ansfor ming
And so began her fascination with the concept of
layering, and it wasn’t until her artists’ residency in
Morocco in 2009 with the French Institute that she had
the opportunity to further explore this idea.
“Morocco has a wedding tradition where they are
required to dress in these layers of clothing for seven
days prior to the wedding,” Diana explains.
“This was all arranged for by the negaffa, who acts
almost like the wedding matchmaker. I wanted to
photograph these women because I wanted to see if
their personality could transcend their clothes, because
these clothes are so heavy that they are literally trapped
in them. I wanted to see if this was also a representation
of women as commodities. So I went from exploring
nudity to the total opposite, from being naked to being
totally clad.”
Her series of photos, called “The Essential Veil”, or
Le Voile Essential, was partly inspired by Gaëtan Gatian
de Clérambault, a French psychiatrist, painter and
photographer who was known for his series of 30,000
images, mostly on women in veiled clothing. From 2009
to 2011, Diana’s photos were exhibited at five galleries
throughout Fes and Marrakesh.
Four years later, Diana found herself on another
artist’s residency in Tunisia, where the situation was
much more different.
“It was post-revolution and the women were more
educated,” she says. “They wore mini skirts and the
women themselves had been cut off from tradition.
So they went from being extremely modern in the
1960s with their miniskirts, to being conservative in
the 1980s leading up to the revolution in 2011. The
situation was quite chaotic, so I wanted to portray that
chaos by photographing these traditional costumes in
construction sites.”
The result was “The Hidden Body”, or L’Envers des
corps, an exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe
(Arab World Institute) in Paris from 2013 to 2014.“I photographed these women because
I wanted to see if their personality could
transcend their clothes, and if they
represented women as commodities”leFt A Moroccan mother
of Berber origin wearing
a niqab, a veiled costume
imported in recent years from
Iran (2010)bottom leFt Diana’s
exhibition at the Institut
du Monde Arabe in Paris,
promoting the Tunisian photo
series (2014)