AL KHAT: REVIVING BELGIAN WOOL
WINNER HENRY VAN DE VELDE AWARD 2025
The combined Binôme work of An Gillis & Nabil Aniss is the result of two different artistic minds. Gillis & Aniss were invited by For The Now to explore how their different histories and backgrounds can create a new design language.
Nabil Aniss was born in Meknes, Morocco, in 1990 and has been living and working in Brussels since 2009. He is a multidisciplinary artist (Videos & sound installations) and university guest lecturer. Nabil Aniss’ work is based on asymmetrical power relations and determinism in society.
An Gillis designs furniture objects and installations for the public domain that are a cross-over between art and functionality. She always starts from an investigation into local history and translates this immaterial heritage into material objects.
The collaboration resulted in the rebirth of a multifunctional Berber object, locally produced and made out of Belgian wool.
Limited edition: 3 pc.
“Al Khat revives Belgian wool and links it with our combined history in a modern take”
Nabil Aniss
Nabil Aniss
The object is based on the lost history of the Haïk, a multifunctional woven garment of the Berber tribes living in the anti-Atlas in Morocco. They used this object for clothing, as a low sitting object and as artistic work, weaving a graphic of the surroundings they lived in (mountains) or just straight lines.
The Haïk has many links with the typical Flemish history of wall carpets, and this in graphics as well as in material. In Flanders, the graphics on the wall carpets also told local stories and history like war battles and conquests.
Our object “Al Khat” is a multifunctional object. It is a low sitting object (a flat cushion) referring to Berber tradition, and at the same time an artistic wall piece with graphics that refer to our current lifestyle society with overconsumption.
The graphic work was created from a painting that deconstructed the barcode, emptying it of its destructive essence, followed by a passage through digital photography, before being transformed into weaving.
The graphic work was created from a painting that deconstructed the barcode, emptying it of its destructive essence, followed by a passage through digital photography, before being transformed into weaving.
The object is woven on a Jacquard loom, referring to Flemish tapestry history. This technique allows to weave complex patterns.
Al Khat is made from Belgian wool, the material the Berbers used for The Haïk and that was used for wall carpets. During our research we noticed that Belgian wool currently largely goes into the incinerator and that the Belgian wool production chain is no longer in place. Al Khat revives this local material and links it with our combined history in a modern take.
The project was featured in Feeling Wonen, Knack weekend and The Brussels times and showcased on For The Now 2023 and the Texture museum in Kortrijk.
In the coming months, Gillis & Aniss will investigate how they can easily make Belgian wool available to designers again. We believe that even more than the object itself, this is the most important outcome of our research.
To realize this project, we collaborated with several partners including B&T Textilia, a leading Belgian weaving mill, a small-scale local spinning mill La filature du Hibou and Céline Lambrechts, wool expert and textile designer.
“By connecting local craft and industrial companies, a qualitative destination can again be given to our local wool”
An Gillis