Thérèse

In 1935 and 1936, the French ethnographer Thérèse Rivière lived and worked with the Ath Abderrahman nomadic tribe in the Aurès region of Algeria.

She took 3500 photographs and collected hundreds of objects, plant specimens, sounds, sketches, films and stories during this mission. She also returned to Paris with a collection of drawings, by adults and children, today known as the Album of North African Indigenous Drawings.

Her engaged and passionate practice was unique for a museum ethnographer.

Her work has, until recently, been largely forgotten, eclipsed in part by researchers like Germaine Tillion (also on the 1935 mission) and Thérèse's brother Georges Henri Rivière, founder of the Arts and Popular Tradition Museum.

Ten years after that first mission, Thérèse Rivière, now thought to have been bipolar, was forcibly interned in mental hospitals, where she remained for two decades, until her death.

Atlas Rural Carpets

"The region's rugs are almost exclusively knotted using symmetrical knots over two warp threads, with Berber knots only used very sporadically. Both the pile yarns and the typical five to ten wefts feature loose spinning, which gives the rugs their characteristically soft, blanket-like character and accentuates the wool's shine in the flat pile with a height of roughly twenty mm (0.8 in.). The loose structure supports the picturesque quality of the surface but also significantly reduces the service life, which is why very few rugs from before 1970 have survived.

Today the group of rugs with a natural white ground is most widespread in the region. In the older examples from the 1960s and 1970s, the warp, weft, and pile consist of white wool with designs usually made from undyed brown and black wool..." - Gebhart Blazek