Tunisian artificer turn rags into friendly rugs

Najet unravels an antique pair of jeans, raw material for a dressmaker carpet: conventional, eco-friendly crafts are being adapted for new markets thanks to a venture born inside the Tunisian desolate tract.

“I learned to weave at a young age, from my mother,” said the 52-year-old from the oasis town of Nefta, 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of Tunis.

Now, she is making a dwelling from it.

She is promoting her Turkish-fashion kilim rugs via Shanti, a social corporation that helps artisans from across the North African u . S . Attain shoppers and convey vital sales into some of its most marginalized communities.

Shanti is the brainchild of Najet’s Franco-Tunisian nephew Mehdi Baccouche.

“Unstitching old jumpers, tearing up old cotton garments, making rugs out of them, it’s a folk art found in all Tunisian homes,” he told AFP.

While the skill “has been around forever”, reaching buyers is a challenge, he added.

Back in 2014, he had asked his aunt to weave carpets for his friends, soon moving to selling them via Facebook.

Seeing the potential, two years later he created Shanti, which buys carpets and takes charge of getting them to consumers.

It also employs designers who work with artisans to improve their design skills and make their products more marketable.

“These are my creations, they come out of my imagination and Shanti approved them,” Najet said.

Najet uses an eclectic array of old pullovers, socks and assorted pass-me-downs from the local flea market, giving them a new life as rugs.

She has little fear of running out of raw materials.

Despite a lean patch, the Tunisian clothes industry still keeps 1,600 firms in business, providing 100 times that many jobs.

In Nefta, a town of some 22,000 people, Shanti has also set up a haberdashery where weavers have free access to balls of wool recycled from second-hand clothes.

The association’s local coordinator Fatima Alhamal, Najet’s daughter, says the store makes “a huge difference”.

Previously, “craftswomen had to go and find materials, which they had to pay for, then earned 12-15 euros for a kilim”.

Now Shanti pays them 40 euros ($43) apiece, up to a maximum of four a month each to avoid pressuring them into overwork.

It then sells them in Tunisia and abroad.

The association also helps the workers improve their work spaces, for example with air conditioning — a necessity in southern Tunisia’s blistering summer heat.

The work has changed the social standing of the women involved.

“People see them completely differently now,” Fatma said.

Najet says she is happy to be making a living from home.

“I don’t have to go out for anything, I can cook and eat here, I can work comfortably.”

Baccouche said before everything human beings teased him for buying involved in “an antique ladies’ craft”.

But the task fills a precious niche in an area in which ladies are disproportionately underemployed, and which has confronted an ever-worsening financial disaster for the reason that before the revolt that sparked the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011.

“It was important to show that you can be an old woman who never went to school and doesn’t know how to use the internet, but you can still do something and earn a living from it,” he said.

Yet the association also tries to avoid creating conflicts within families.

It pays the women not in cash but in post office accounts where their husbands can’t see how much they are making — or use it to pay household bills.

Using its system of ordering in advance, Shanti runs a boutique in the capital Tunis.

“L’Artisanerie” also acts as a space for coordinators who train artisans from other rural areas, making bamboo furniture, poetry and embroidery.

In four years, more than 200 producers have been able to find a market for their work. Sixty work every day for L’Artisanerie.

“We’re trying to show that you can make something 100 percent Tunisian, with Tunisian materials and skills, but with a design that fits current tastes,” Baccouche said.

Some products, joint creations by means of artisans and Shanti designers, are offered to design-conscious Tunisians.

Others are exported or bought to bigger firms — such as Indigo, a producer for Zara, or Mango, which recently sold 164 rugs crafted from recycled denims.

For now, the device nevertheless relies on some assist from non-earnings including Oxfam or on Danish development useful resource.

But Baccouche has large goals, with Shanti increasing into sustainable agriculture and eco-tourism.

“We’re trying to set up an entire, eco-friendly production and logistics chain,” he said.