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.