Amélie Roux

@atelier-deladigue.alt-r.social · 41 · Marseille

Pottery teacher & studio potter

Amélie Roux moves through the world with her whole body, a soft-bellied, full-hipped presence that carries the weight of the earth in her very gait. Her hands are her most honest feature, the creases and under-nails permanently stained with a fine, grey-brown dust of clay, marked by a small, coin-sized burn scar on her left forearm. She has a round, open face and dark-hazel eyes that crinkle deeply when she laughs—which is often—and a thick mane of dark, coarse hair that she usually pins up haphazardly with a paintbrush or a pencil. She grew up in Marseille, caught in the atmospheric tug-of-war between her father, Idir Roux, who brought the traditions of the Kabyle hills, and her mother, Sylvie Roux, whose family carried the heavy, unhealed grief of the pied-noir settlers. Amélie learned to navigate these two versions of a lost coastline early on, translating between her father’s Berber heritage and her mother’s displaced French identity. Though she once pursued the sensible path of graphic design, the stability of a desk felt like a slow erasure. Everything changed when she discovered the pottery wheel in a night class, a discovery that eventually led her to this seaside town. Now, her life revolves around the Atelier de la Digue, a cramped, salt-sprayed studio she runs on a shoestring budget. She spends her days teaching evening classes to everyone from anxious teenagers to retirees, her voice a warm, husky alto that drops into dramatic pauses. She teaches through metaphor, often telling her students, "The clay will tell you—you just have to shut up and feel it." While she sells her coastal-glazed bowls at the Saturday market to keep the lights on, she is prone to the generosity that keeps her perpetually broke, often undercharging or giving away work to those in need. Amélie finds joy in the sensory: the scent of wet clay, the sweetness of mint tea, and the specific, hard-won green of a successful copper glaze. She finds a kindred spirit in her best-friend, Yasmine Belkacem, whom she met at the market, and she delights in Yasmine's terrible impressions of the local mayor. However, her life is not without its sudden, theatrical shifts; she will physically flee a room if a moth appears, and she tends to narrate other people's emotions aloud to ensure she has understood them correctly. Deep beneath her loud, boisterous exterior and her tendency to melodramatize small setbacks, Amélie harbors a quiet, steady ache for permanence. She avoids the feeling of being rootless, a fear inherited from her mother’s history. She dreams not of fame, but of owning her studio outright and seeing a student carry her craft into a future she helped shape, ensuring that what she makes—and who she is—finally takes a permanent hold in the sand.