Muslim artist who turned grief into garden for Europe’s drowned

PARIS (MNTV) — For most of his career, Rachid Koraïchi has been known as one of the Arab world’s most celebrated living artists — a painter, sculptor and master calligrapher whose work fuses Sufi mysticism, Arabic script and North African craft into a language entirely his own. 

But it is a garden of the dead, not a gallery, that may prove his most enduring work.

Born in Aïn Beïda, Algeria, in 1947 and now living between France and Tunisia, Koraïchi is among the most institutionally recognised artists of his generation. 

He holds the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Jameel Prize for contemporary art inspired by Islamic tradition, has represented his region twice at the Venice Biennale, and sits in collections including the British Museum. 

His signature indigo silk banners, alabaster tablets and corten-steel sculptures, inscribed with ciphers and mystical symbols, have shown everywhere from the Centre Pompidou to New York.

Yet in recent years Koraïchi’s name has become inseparable from the Jardin d’Afrique — the Garden of Africa — a cemetery he built and paid for himself in the Tunisian coastal town of Zarzis, to give dignified burial to the migrants who drown in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe.

Palace for forgotten

The project was born of horror.

 For years, the bodies of migrants washing up on Tunisia’s beaches had been dumped, unnamed, in a former rubbish tip. 

Koraïchi, learning of this, resolved to build them something closer to a palace than a grave — a place of jasmine and flowering orange trees where families might one day come to grieve.

Opened in 2021 and recognised by UNESCO, the Jardin d’Afrique is a non-denominational cemetery, garden and place of remembrance. Its floors are lined with the ceramic tiles that recur throughout Koraïchi’s art, transforming the site into something between a memorial and a living artwork. 

Crucially, it is also a DNA database: a small staff records genetic material from the dead, in the hope of one day reuniting families with the loved ones they lost at sea.

The inspiration, Koraïchi has said, came from the parting words of his grandfather — and from a refusal to accept indifference to the drowned.

Art as indictment

What makes Koraïchi’s project resonate is its timing. It exists because the dying has not stopped. 

The artist has spoken of corpses arriving every week, and of his fear that the cemetery would soon be overwhelmed — a warning borne out by the relentless toll of a crossing that remains among the deadliest migration routes on earth, and by the mass arrivals and drownings that continue to mark Europe’s southern frontier from Lampedusa to Ceuta.

His gallery work has increasingly drawn on the garden. 

Exhibitions in Paris, London and New York have transformed white-walled spaces into ad-hoc shrines — luminous indigo canvases and tombstone-like alabaster tablets that ask visitors to sit with a grief most of Europe would rather not see. 

A musical work, Le Jardin d’Afrique, was later composed in its honour, its libretto echoing the voices of living migrants.

Koraïchi has been candid that he can no longer fund the garden alone, and has appealed for donors to sustain and expand it. 

That, too, is part of the indictment: an 78-year-old artist, spending his own money to bury the people European policy has failed, while the institutions with real power look away.

In a Europe increasingly defined by walls and hostility toward Muslims and migrants alike, Koraïchi’s answer has been the opposite — to take the discarded and the anonymous, and insist, in tile and indigo and stone, on their dignity. 

As he told one interviewer, the garden is about the depths of our shared humanity. It is also, quietly, a rebuke to a continent that has mislaid its own.