Cyril Mohamed a.k.a Keya

Keya works with a language of his own invention. Through this personal alphabet he builds a script in which the sign becomes a trace and matter becomes memory. His work asks what endures once stories fade.

As a child, Keya handled, assembled, cut and salvaged, a way of understanding the world through gesture, long before words. In 1992 he was sent to former Yugoslavia as a UN peacekeeper and deminer; the experience left a lasting mark on his relationship to memory and trace. Back in France, making art became a necessity: charcoal, earth, wine and organic matter became his pigments.

Dyslexic, he invented a personal alphabet while his wife was expecting their child, conceived as a secret bond with that child. This code became the heart of his work.

Based in Marrakech since 2016, he has worked since 2020 with weavers of the Middle Atlas, translating his alphabet into wool, each piece bearing a double signature. His collaborations translate the history of a place or a material: great French wines reduced to pigment in Los Angeles, the story of tea in Morocco with the Wright tea house for “ATAY” at the Four Seasons Marrakech.