Listening to the waters, songs of the land, conversation between Margarida Mendes & QANAT
Drawing on the research framework offered by the exhibition CATHARSIS, in this conversation curator Margarida Mendes comes in dialogue with QANAT to expand on a reflection around the entanglements between research-led and participatory artistic practices, water guardianship and listening as a mode to attune to the erasures, transformations and resistances taking place in different landscapes.
While unpacking different ways in which artists facilitate or enact listening, not only as a poetical, but also as a political practice, the talk will especially revert around the transforming and fragile landscapes of the Moroccan oasis, from Marrakech to Tazarine, delving into the existing research developed by QANAT in general and artist Rim Mejdi in particular.
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Margarida Mendes is a researcher, curator, artist, and educator, exploring the overlap between critical ecology, experimental film, sound practices and ecopedagogy. She creates transdisciplinary forums, exhibitions and experiential works where alternative modes of education and sensing practices may catalyse political imagination and restorative action.
Rim Mejdi is a Moroccan filmmaker, theatre director, and curator based in Marrakech. From photography to performance to cinema, she maps intimacy, the body, and its torments through an exploration of coming of age and transitional moments of adolescence. She is equally interested in nature and in the urban and peri-urban spaces of Marrakech and its surroundings, approached as body-territories bearing the collective and memorial ruptures caused by capitalist hegemony as manifested through tourism, gentrification, and extractivism. She has been part of several collectives, including QANAT, and she works as a curator for the Dar Bellarj Foundation since 2019.