Before Words, the Gesture
Born in 1993 in Toulouse and based between Paris and Casablanca, Samy Snoussi is a French-Moroccan multidisciplinary artist whose practice interrogates language through the body and material. Trained in art history and urban design in Montreal, he works across drawing, sculpture, textiles, and installation, developing a gestural vocabulary rooted in repetition, friction, and emotion rather than legibility. Shaped by his experience of dyslexia and dysgraphia, his symbols resist fixed meaning and invite a sensory, embodied encounter.
In a detailed interview with Khamsa, Snoussi reflects on the processes and gestures that underpin his practice.
1. When you start a new piece, what comes first: the gesture, the emotion, or the material you want to “listen to”?
For me, the first thing is always an emotion. Before the gesture; my symbols may look ancient because they come from the body’s oldest memory: movement, pressure, friction. But they are also personal because they trace my own hesitations, my own insistence.
So the “beginning” is not an idea; it’s a physical vibration between me and the surface.
The gesture follows, the emotion unfolds afterward, and the form arrives almost as an echo, a mental map.
2. When you’re drawing, do you feel closer to inventing a new alphabet, or to unlearning the one you were taught?
I think I am unlearning in order to invent. Language, as I received it, never fully belonged to me—it slipped, it fragmented, it demanded a precision I couldn’t always offer. So my practice became a way of loosening its grip. When I draw, I’m not writing in the conventional sense. I’m allowing my hand to produce meaning without words, without correctness, without grammar. The result sometimes feels like an alphabet, but one that refuses to stabilise.
It’s a language that emerges from unlearning—an alphabet that doesn’t ask to be read but to be felt.
3. Your methodology is highly repetitive, almost ritualistic, What happens to your mind during this process: is it meditation, self-rebellion, or something completely different?
Repetition suspends the mind. At a certain point, the act becomes so mechanical that I disappear inside it. But it’s not meditation in the peaceful sense. And it’s not rebellion either. It’s more like a trance produced by friction: my hand insists, the material resists, and my body becomes the space in which these two forces negotiate. In that state, I stop trying to control the outcome.
What remains is a choreography—an ongoing conversation between discipline and accident, between intention and surrender.
4. Your work travels across paper, stone, clay, textiles, even bodies in motion. What does each material unlock in you?
Each material transforms my gesture. Paper absorbs; stone pushes back; clay remembers; textiles vibrate; bodies answer.
Paper allows speed.
Stone demands respect.
Clay slows me down.
Textile invites softness and tension at once.
I think what I secretly long for is to work with environments—architecture, landscapes, public spaces where people move through the work rather than just standing before it. Perhaps the world itself could become a surface.
5. How has your relationship with dyslexia and dysgraphia transformed the way you create and the way you see your place in the world?
They have made me aware of the violence of norms very early on. Writing was supposed to be a simple act, yet my body refused to perform it in the prescribed way. That refusal became a kind of compass.
Instead of correcting the “error,” I chose to explore it.
The distortions of language that once isolated me now open portals in my practice. They make me alert to otherness—both my own and that of others.
I think it has given me a strange kind of freedom. If the world’s main system of meaning never fit me, then I am free to construct my own.
6. What do you hope viewers feel when they encounter your work for the first time; recognition, mystery, or simply the urge to touch the surface?
I don’t want viewers to decipher anything. If anything, I hope they feel permission—permission to not understand, to abandon the expectation of meaning, to respond physically instead of intellectually.
If recognition happens, it’s because the body remembers things the mind has forgotten.
If someone wants to touch the surface, that is the highest compliment: it means the work has bypassed language and entered the realm of sensation.
