Margaux Derhy

Voices of Morocco is a storytelling series that highlights the creatives shaping Morocco today. From designers and curators to artists and makers, each feature offers a personal lens into life, place, and process. Through their words, we explore what inspires their work, how they navigate Morocco, and the spaces, rituals, and ideas that continue to influence their craft, both within and beyond their daily practice.

Margaux Derhy is a Franco-Moroccan multidisciplinary artist working between Paris and Sidi R’bat, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Her practice brings together painting, machine embroidery, hand embroidery, and sfiffa, a traditional Moroccan silk cord braiding technique. At the center of her work are family photographic archives from the 1960s and the questions they continue to hold around memory, cultural transmission, diaspora, and what it means to belong to two worlds at once.


Through image, thread, and gesture, Derhy’s work considers how identity is carried across generations and reinterpreted through making.We asked her to reflect on Morocco, the places that ground her, and how slowness, memory, and collective process continue to shape the way she creates.

What does “home” mean to you in Morocco?

The ocean you can hear from the workshop windows. The specific quality of light in Sidi R’bat, very direct, very clear, nothing soft about it. Home for me in Morocco is less about a house than about the rhythm of a particular kind of day: showing up, working alongside people you trust deeply, then sitting together when the light changes.


But home is also something deeper because my father’s family comes from the Souss-Massa region, and so did his ancestors before him. Returning to work in Sidi R’bat was not just a practical decision. It was a way of going back to something I had not fully known yet.

I think home is also a practice. You have to keep returning to it.

Is there a specific place in Morocco that feels especially grounding or significant to you?

Sidi R’bat, without question. It is a small coastal village near Massa, in the Souss region. We built the atelier there, and for me it has become the physical center of everything. The landscape is stark: dunes, Atlantic wind, flamingos on the lagoon. There is nothing decorative about it. That honesty suits the work.

How has Morocco shaped the way you see the world or yourself?

Morocco gave me a different relationship to time. When you work in an atelier where a single embroidery can take weeks, where a technique like sfiffa is transmitted through hands rather than manuals, you start to understand that making something well means accepting that it will take as long as it takes. That has reshaped how I think about everything: artistic process, relationships, institutions.

It also gave me the experience of never quite fitting. I’m French by upbringing, Moroccan by family, and I’ve spent a lot of my life navigating the gap between those two identities. My work lives in that gap. It does not try to resolve it. It tries to inhabit it honestly.


What originally drew you to the creative field?

A photograph. My grandmother’s photograph, specifically a 1960s image of women in ceremonial dress, documenting a world that was already disappearing. I had studied economics, then management. I was doing everything I was supposed to do. But that photograph would not leave me alone.

I went back to school, first to Central Saint Martins and then to the Royal College of Art in London, and realized that what I was really trying to do was find a form of language adequate to what photographs could not say on their own. Embroidery became that language. It is slow enough to hold complexity. It is material enough to feel real.


Your work bridges handmade processes and contemporary creation. What does that connection look like in practice, from first idea to final object?

It always starts with an archive, a photograph, a fragment of family or collective history. I sit with it for a long time before touching it. Then there is a period of translation: what does this image become in thread? What does scale do to it?

Then comes the collaborative conversation with the atelier team. Our technical director will look at what I am envisioning and tell me immediately whether it is feasible, what technique would serve it best, where my instinct is wrong. Those conversations change the work significantly, and they should. By the time a piece is finished, it genuinely belongs to several people.


What have you learned from working closely with the women in your atelier, especially around trust, time, and quality?

The most important thing to say first is that they are not artisans. None of us were embroiderers when we started. We learned together. That changes everything about the dynamic. There was no hierarchy between someone who knows and someone who executes. We were all figuring it out at the same time, which created a very particular kind of trust.


What I have learned is that expertise built collectively belongs to everyone. And that the time it takes to build it, slowly, through repetition and conversation and occasional disagreement, is not a cost. It is the work itself.

Thank you, Margaux, for sharing such a thoughtful and generous reflection. Through your  perspective, Morocco emerges as a place of return, transmission, and quiet rigor, where family archives become living material and making becomes a way of staying close to complexity.  Continue to follow her work here.