17 May, Harvest Festival x International Society of Ethnobiology Congress Community Celebration, Performance, DJ set and Maqam.tv Installation,  DaDa, Jma El Fna, 10pm to 1pm.  

This event is free but registration is encouraged via Eventbrite (tickets available from 6 May).

Sma W Lma project performed by Saad El Baraka and Mokhtar Hsina of Studio Noujoum La Gironde, followed by Guedra, Guedra dj set. Maqam.TV shorts Installation running throughout the evening

Join us from 10pm to 1pm for a night of Maqam.tv curated shorts, a sonic performance and eclectic DJ set.

Following the collective meal hosted for the 18th International Ethnobiology Congress participants at DaDa, the space will open up to welcome our local community marking the opening weekend of Harvest Festival Marrakech to join us in welcoming the over 350 International Ethnobiology congress attendees joining us from around the world; from over 95 countries to be precise. This will be an incredible moment for our local communities to share space and cross pollinate with congress attendees. 

Saad El Baraka and Mokhtar Hsina of Studio Noujoum La Gironde will be performing their project Sma W Lma, (land and water) from 10pm to 11pm. 

The evening’s final offering is a dj set from Morocco’s very own DJ Guedra, Guedra, a DJ/Producer exploring tribal polyrhythms of the past and dancefloor music.

Maqam.tv x Harvest Festival Marrakech Spring ‘24

An audiovisual compilation showing bodies that at all times have bore witness, that are wealthy of their inheritances, carriers of multitudes, travelers of the earth —now pushing their ways towards visibility, defying linearities, interrupting capitalistic and settler modes of governance, extraction and exclusion. These six films, from Palestine, Mexico, Vietnam and Australia’s Northern Territory are held together by gestures of resistance and survivance; let us learn from them.

Maqam.tv has curated a pertinent and thought provoking selection of films that in their combined spirit can be seen as a call to action. These films respond to the thematics and contexts wrapping the congress programming. The films will be running throughout the evening and overall will run roughly twice each, in succession from 8pm until 1pm.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos: The Batalla Trilogy

“Batalla”, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

2017, color, 4’ 35

A brief homage to the resistance of the body fighting against power.

After the ominous attack that the paramilitary and police corporations carried on September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, 43 peasant students disappeared, three were confirmed dead in 2024 and the student Aldo Gutiérrez Solano remains in a coma until today. Prior to their disappearance, the students were preparing to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, following a tradition where they commandeered several buses to travel to Mexico City. The images in the field are echoes of the flowers of the dead that the students were planting before their disappearance. 

“Fracking”, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

2018, 35mm & HD, color-b&w, 3’ 

Planetary battle over the porous body of the earth. This is the battle of the Earth.
Images referring to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which is the underground petroleum extraction process that involves the injection of fluids under high pressure into low permeability rock to induce fractures to increase the rock’s permeability.

“Tear Gas”, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

2019, b&w, 1’ 35

The Politics of Breathing: Tear Gas.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán, Mexico) is a group of independent artists who experiment with documentary approaches and found footage. Their goal is to challenge the commercialization of audiovisual creativity and the tedium of conventional television and cinema production. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos arose as a resistance movement and collective action that began cooperating amid major protests against the Mexican government, reporting through an anonymous YouTube channel for fear of retaliation.

“Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams”, Karrabing Film Collective

2016, color, 29’, English

Across a series of flashbacks, an extended Indigenous family argues about what caused their boat’s motor to break down and leave them stranded out in the bush. As they consider the roles played in the incident by the ancestral presence, the regulatory state and the Christian faith, Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams explores the multiple demands and inescapable vortexes of contemporary Indigenous life.

Karrabing Film Collective is an Indigenous media group who use filmmaking to interrogate the conditions of inequality for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory of Australia and retain connections to land and their ancestors. Composed of some thirty extended family members whose ancestral lands stretch across saltwaters and inlands and the Italian Alps, Karrabing together create films using an “improvisational realism” that opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Their body of cinematic work re-animates a complex assemblage of practices and scales of relation: to the land, to geology, to ancestors, to human and non-human life, and to visual culture.

“Landscape Series #1”, Nguyen Trinh Thi

2013, color, 5’

An outstretched arm, a hand, a finger, pointing; the body’s way of saying “look”. Yet we see and know nothing about what is being pointed at. It remains unseen and unspoken, only sensed through the repeated gesture (a tradition practiced by local photojournalists) in the found images of Landscape Series #1. The only sound, the click of the projector as each image slides into the next, makes a quiet absence beyond the visual felt.

What is being looked at is gone, hidden or missing. What is left is the embodied act of looking; the relational movement which connects the people in the images to the natural landscapes, the buildings, roads and wounded skin. Cultural and affect theorists have argued that gestures are movements through which structures of power are embodied, produced, reinstated and, also, potentially interrupted.

Nguyễn Trinh Thi (1973, Vietnam) is a Hanoi-based independent filmmaker and video/media artist. Nguyễn studied journalism, photography, international relations and ethnographic film in the United States. Her diverse practice has consistently investigated the role of memory in the necessary unveiling of hidden, displaced or misinterpreted histories; and examined the position of artists in the Vietnamese society. Nguyễn is the founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent centre for documentary film and the moving image art in Hanoi since 2009.

“Yom al-Ard”, Monica Maurer

2019, color, 15’19, English and Arabic

Yom Al Ard is a portrait of the fragmentation of the land, the experience, and the people of Palestine, showcasing the systematic efforts to disperse, fragment, and destroy the audiovisual memory and collective identity of Palestinians. It is composed of rare footage shot in the Galilee (Nazareth, Deir Hanna, and Sakhnin) in celebration of the 5th Land Day Anniversary on March 1981 which has recently been restored and digitised. Land Day is held every year to commemorate the six Palestinian protesters who were killed by Israeli forces and the hundred others wounded during mass demonstrations against land confiscation on March 30 1976. The film pays homage to the transversal unity of the people, their collective energy in the defense of Palestinian identity –unimaginable today– and to their charismatic leader, the five times Mayor of Nazareth and poet Tawfik Zayyad.

Monica Maurer is a German director who worked with the PLO’s Palestine Film Unit (now Palestinian Cinema Institution) in the 70’s. Between 1977 and 1982 Monica Maurer made 6 films on the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon. The films were part of a collective effort to build the base of a future Palestinian state: democratic and secular, while aiming at social change and justice. She is currently based and working in Rome on a monumental project to digitize the Palestinian visual documents of this era.

This event has been co-curated with @harvestfestivalmarrakech @qanat_collective 

17 May

10pm-1 pm