Culture Vultures

Culture Vultures We are an arts and cultural organization coming from the grass roots of Morocco. Keeping you Morocco-connected.

Our objective is to invite and provide an immersive cultural program; authentic and beyond the postcard.

For four mornings around the Fez festival this June, we are offering small-group artisan visits through the medina. Six ...
17/05/2026

For four mornings around the Fez festival this June, we are offering small-group artisan visits through the medina. Six people maximum, eight workshops, a morning that moves at the pace of conversation rather than an itinerary.

With Culture Vultures, visit independent weavers, wood carvers, metal smiths, leather workers, to name a few; people who have been working these crafts in this city for millenia. The artisan tour facilitators and team have been building these relationships over 15 years, and what that means in practice is that the door is open, and our good terms with the creative community allow you to engage with Fez’ artisanship on a deep and genuine level.

The visit runs 09:45 to 13:30, starting from Batha where we are also hosting an exhibition on the region's crafts during the festival period. Places are limited and will go quickly.
Available am. - Thurs 4th, Sat 6th, Sun 7th, or Mon 8th June.

If you are heading to Fez for the festival, this is worth knowing about. Feel free to share if you are a community hub or service..

To book or ask questions: DM

AiR Sefrou is pleased to welcome Chris Leach, master weaver and textile researcher, for a three-week residency this May....
06/05/2026

AiR Sefrou is pleased to welcome Chris Leach, master weaver and textile researcher, for a three-week residency this May.

Following her participation in Textile Quest last year, Chris returns to Sefrou to further develop her research into Moroccan weaving practices. Her residency will focus on gaining an operational understanding of weaving across diverse contexts, from independent artisan workshops to cooperatives, training centres, and semi-industrial production sites.

Working closely with local artisans, Chris will explore the full weaving process, from design decisions and warp preparation to finished textile, alongside broader questions around knowledge transmission, gender roles, and the socio-economic dimensions of craft.

This residency is grounded in ethnographic participation, exchange, sharing skills, experiences, and perspectives between Moroccan weavers and international practice.

Want a front-row seat to Chris’s discoveries? Comment “WEAVING CURIOUS” below .If 10 people are in, we’ll host a Zoom session.

Welcome back, Chris. We are honored to facilitate this important research.

A day of extremes!! It’s almost hard to believe that in under five hours Morocco can show you two entirely different rea...
02/05/2026

A day of extremes!! It’s almost hard to believe that in under five hours Morocco can show you two entirely different realities. This morning we climbed towards Tizi n’Tirghist and stood in front of the rock engravings carved into stone thousands of years ago. Pastoral scenes, symbols, and gestures that still echo the presence of those who moved through these valleys long before us.

And then… the full intensity and pulse of Marrakech!!!
Motorbikes, calls to prayer, heat, trade, movement, lights 💥💥💥 This contrast is part of what makes Morocco so extraordinary - a country where multiple temporalities and ways of living exist side by side, just a few hours apart.

In Aït Bouguemez, wool work has long been shaped by a shared rhythm: women card and spin the fibre, while men traditiona...
01/05/2026

In Aït Bouguemez, wool work has long been shaped by a shared rhythm: women card and spin the fibre, while men traditionally take on the knitting. Today, it is increasingly rare to find men who still knit, and even rarer to encounter households continuing to produce woollen garments for the harsh winter months.

We feel incredibly grateful to be welcomed, year after year, into the home of Fadma and Mohammed, an Amazigh family whose thread is among the finest in the valley. Spending time with Mohammed - a shepherd and one of the few remaining knitters - offers a direct connection to ways of life that are slowly disappearing. Through his stories, we learn how people once lived in deep relationship with the land, and how essential these handmade garments were for surviving the freezing winters of the High Atlas Mountains.

A heartfelt thank you as well to Sfia and 🐑🏡 Their work is vital in supporting and employing local women artisans, while also advocating for the future of sheep, wool, and shepherding traditions in the High Atlas - particularly in the Aït Bouguemez region.

From desert plains to high, snow-capped mountains, we finally arrived at one of the highlights of our Textile Quest: Aït...
30/04/2026

From desert plains to high, snow-capped mountains, we finally arrived at one of the highlights of our Textile Quest: Aït Bougmez, also known as the Happy Valley.

A place where deep time and living tradition converge - from dinosaur footprints dating back 185 million years to our yearly visit to a women run carpet cooperative rooted in community, skill, and resilience.

The cooperative works primarily with locally sourced wool and natural dyes, preserving ancestral Amazigh knowledge passed down through generations. Each piece carries not only material intelligence, but also stories of land, identity, and continuity.

During our visit, we shared an open exchange of practices - discussing how cooperatives and guilds are structured across different contexts, from the US to Morocco. We spoke about sales strategies, which products resonate most with buyers, and how each group navigates sustainability, pricing, and visibility.

Leaving us with questions that continue to travel with us: how do we define fair exchange, and what does it truly look like across cultures and economies? How do we build more direct, meaningful relationships between makers and buyers? And how do we honour ancestral knowledge while allowing it to evolve within contemporary realities?

In Textile Quest, we discover Morocco through textiles, material culture, and the people who sustain them 🪡 In Ksar El K...
30/04/2026

In Textile Quest, we discover Morocco through textiles, material culture, and the people who sustain them 🪡 In Ksar El Khorbat, we took part in an embroidery workshop on traditional taharuit shawls, guided by local artisans, learning how Amazigh symbols carry stories, protection, and identity through thread.

We were then welcomed into a local family home to share an incredible rfisa, a moment of generosity and connection around the table.

In the afternoon, Faisal guided us through the ksar and its surrounding oasis, showing us how architecture, landscape, and daily life are deeply intertwined, all shaped by climate, community, and generations of knowledge.

This is at the heart of Textile Quest: travelling with intention, supporting local economies, and creating space to learn directly from the people who keep these cultural practices alive 🇲🇦🇲🇦🧶🤝

Textile Quest this spring brought us face to face with some of the most generous transmitters of culture we could have e...
29/04/2026

Textile Quest this spring brought us face to face with some of the most generous transmitters of culture we could have encountered. People who carry lived knowledge, or pursued with the kind of quiet passion

At Volubilis, Abdelhay walked us through the ruins with the grace of someone who belongs and deeply cares. Local, informed, and quietly extraordinary. In Fez, our long-term collaborator Professor Sadik Rddad gave the group something that travelled with them for the rest of the journey - a sharp, humane framework for understanding Amazigh identity, its politics and its heritage. Crossing the Atlas afterwards, our Questers engaged differently. In the fortressed village in the southeast, Faisal gave us two hours of local epereinced knowledge delivered with intelligence and warmth. And in the Dades, Anir, son of a nomad, Amazigh activist, guide - shared his life and local culture with flair as fluently as his landscape.

This is what we mean when we say the program is built from the ground up. These are just some of our contributors who make Textile Quest so very meaningful.

In Fez, inside Dar Al Tiraz, we spent an afternoon with Si Hassan — a master among master weavers, and Isabel Raiboff, a...
28/04/2026

In Fez, inside Dar Al Tiraz, we spent an afternoon with Si Hassan — a master among master weavers, and Isabel Raiboff, anthropologist and researcher, who together opened up the world of drawloom weaving for our group of weavers from the Hudson-Mohawk Weavers' Guild.

The drawloom is one of the oldest weaving technologies known, with the earliest confirmed drawloom fabrics dating to around 400 BC Wikipedia, later travelling the Silk Road west into the Islamic world and eventually into the weaving centers of medieval Europe. Si Hassan works within a tradition that carries all of that weight.

The scale of the commitment is hard to take in at first. Six months to set up the shafts. Another six months to design the drawdowns. Then one to three months to weave the fabric itself. And because the master weaver works from the reverse side, a mirror is required to check how the pattern is actually developing, the right side of the cloth just out of direct view.

What stayed with us most wasn't the technical depth, remarkable as it is. It was how Si Hassan speaks about his relationship to the craft. The loom and the material, he explained, must be treated as living matter. He arrives at work centered, knowing that his mood travels directly into the threads. Silk, he told us, is alive, it will call for water when it needs moisture. You have to listen.

He described his first encounter with weaving as passion, an intense pull toward something not yet fully understood. Over time, that passion settled into patience, and patience deepened into something closer to enduring love.

In Chefchaoen, in an ancient fundok just off the main square, we sat with a saddle maker whose work is as practical as i...
27/04/2026

In Chefchaoen, in an ancient fundok just off the main square, we sat with a saddle maker whose work is as practical as it gets, donkey saddles assembled with sacks and old blankets and stuffed with straw. Upcycling not as a trend but as a long standing logic. We talked in somewhat disbelief. Then we got back on the road toward Fez and there they were the same saddles, on working donkeys, in abundance the landscape rolling past the windows. Textile Quest builds enough context that the world outside the workshop starts to speak back.

The moment we hit Fez, something shifts. The air carries dye and cedar shavings, and the medina pulls you in before you've had a chance to orient yourself. Our group, a weavers guild ( Hudson-Mohawk Weavers' Guild), moved through the heart of the city, where the artisan quarters keep the heart of the city alive. We sat with dyers whose hands carry the permanent record of their work, watched card weavers maintain a rhythm that looked almost meditative, and spent time with craftsmen doing damascene silverwork all carrying a patience most of us have quietly abandoned in the digital age.

What makes the artisan quarters of Fez so compelling isn't just what's being made. It's that the making hasn't been tidied up for visitors. These are working spaces. The floors are worn. The tools are real. The conversations, thanks to our guides' long established relationships, were candid.

From a saddle stuffed with straw in Chefchaouen to silver thread under lamplight in Fez , this is what it looks like when craft is still alive

Textile Quest - Day 3. Many thanks to our on-the-ground partners, Green Olive Arts, for leading our half-day artisan tou...
23/04/2026

Textile Quest - Day 3.
Many thanks to our on-the-ground partners, Green Olive Arts, for leading our half-day artisan tour through the Tetouan medina. It’s always inspiring to learn more about their work bringing together local and international communities through creativity and the arts, values we share at Culture Vultures.
We then entered the medina of Tétouan, a UNESCO World Heritage site, where Arab, Spanish, and French influences shape the way the city breathes. Workshops spill into the streets, and many artisans produce for nearby cities like Chefchaouen, their studios functioning more as extensions than destinations. With the rise of tourism in Morocco, it is increasingly rare to encounter a medina where creation exists without spectacle.

At the artisanal complex, we spent time with leather workers and weavers, observing processes passed down through generations. And yet, many artisans continue their work with little structural support, creation that persists regardless of visibility or recognition from institutions.

Who benefits from the global fascination with “craft,” and who gets left behind? What role do we play, as visitors, artists, or consumers, in these dynamics?

When the stars align, the sky shines brighter On the afternoon of our first full day on Textile Quest, we visited the ne...
21/04/2026

When the stars align, the sky shines brighter

On the afternoon of our first full day on Textile Quest, we visited the newly and impeccably restored Beit Yahouda Synagogue. There, we had the privilege of meeting Sonia Cohen, an important member of Morocco’s Jewish community and a passionate collector of the Berberisca wedding dress.

As if by fate, her friend, highly acclaimed American scholar Susan Miller, also joined us, further enriching the experience. Together, they delivered an inspiring presentation on the Jewish contribution to Morocco, and the rich symbolism woven into these exquisite velvet garments, adorned with intricate gold embroidery.

The dress is said to symbolise the Torah itself, in its form, its structure, and its meaning. The shared language of cloth and GOLD thread embroidery, the way both are opened and revealed, the belts and intricate trimmings each element carries intention. Entire volumes could be written about what these dresses express: roles, faith, beliefs, rituals, and identity.

To share just a sliver of what we discovered, numerology plays a powerful role. The number 7 appears in the buttons, while 15 and 17 are associated with good fortune. The 18 benedictions in the Torah echo through symbolic design, alongside motifs of trees and circles of life, and birds representing liberation.

A precious afternoons engagement.

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