Confluence: Public Programme
Between 26th January – 4th February 2023, as part of the second iteration of Confluence’s ‘School of Water’, CCA, QANAT and Le 18 hosted a series of events in Marrakech, Morocco to explore the histories of collective imagining, the interventions and initiatives that emerge from the evolution of water management and changes to different bodies of water.
Through workshops, film screenings and conversations inviting artists, activists and researchers from around the Mediterranean, we investigated the notion of the barzakh; a liminal space, and one in-between where technologies, social formations, and practices of the otherwise keep existing and resisting in the backdrop of colonial and capitalistic erasures.
Moving from water as an elemental and infrastructural force, researching how, while dominant narratives crystallise, counternarratives keep being whispered and shared, carried by (space)ship, fog droplets and oceanic waves travelling times and spaces from the coast of Morocco across the Atlantic, or by the songs and tales of dispossessed populations along riverbanks – from Egypt to Portugal, all the way to South America.
In investigating the ecologies and economies of the sea, we learned about the many ways in which winds carry the potential of new water harvests. In questioning dominant academic infrastructures, engaging with the potential for winds to be vessels of knowledge and modes of unlearning and relearning. By unpacking colonial politics of territorial domination, we asked ourselves how the making of one’s harvest determines the dispossession of many others.
For more information on the project, please visit the Confluence section on the main CCA website.
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The Moroccan Atlantic coastline is full of histories, mobilities, and transformations. What role do artists and filmmakers have in digging up and recounting these erased memories? What are their storytelling strategies? How do they use space to document and fictionalize what is already buried by time? Intersecting their practice and research, filmmaker Tarek Bouraque and […]
This talk explores the connection between agricultural extraction and water dispossession in Southern Morocco. Demonstrating the impact of water-intensive crops on the agrarian social structure and rural communities in Morocco’s neoliberal conjuncture. The agricultural strategies have been directed toward exporting agricultural products to European markets in the past decades. This talk situates the historical origins […]
When Algeria gained independence from France in 1962, French president Charles de Gaulle urgently needed to find a new home for Kourou’s space base. Thanks to its ideal coastal position near the equator, he chose the little town of Kourou in the overseas territory of French Guiana. But no one gave a thought to the […]
In “Living with Foggy Elements” Jamila Bargach looks into the ambiguous apprehension of fog, between the idiom of fascination and rejection of it as a phenomenon in the region of the Aït Baâmrane, Anti-Atlas Mountains of Southwest Morocco, and then through the imaginary possibilities fog invites, from melancholy to reverie, to the technology used to […]
As part of the first iteration of our ‘school of water’, we invite you to join us for a series of events navigating rivers, dams and other in-land waterscapes as sites where both the politics and poetics of mobility, memory, sound, and landscape’s trans/formation come to play. This evening includes a lecture by artist, writer, […]
