Rivering Together
1 June, Rivering Together, a culminating reflection with Manar Moursi, workshop participants, QANAT, Dar Bellarj and LE 18 in the framework of the Ateliers Collectifs, 8pm, Dar Bellarj
Join us for a culminating reflection of a 10 day workshop led by Manar Moursi and Rivering together workshop participants. The event will bring together readings, reflections and meditations from a collective engagement with the Ourika river and its surrounding Oueds.
Rivering Together: Following the trail of the Ourika River to Oued Issyl
A river is not merely composed of its flowing waters; it is a terraforming force, a site for ritual and bathing. It allows raindrops to gather, feeding through its collected waters factories, fauna and flora, birds, fish, rocks, golf courses, humans, and other beings, allowing these forces to converge, intermingle, flourish, decay, enmesh, and intertwine. Landscapes surrounding rivers are, therefore, spaces of relation, allowing us to perceive the river as an integral part of a broader tapestry.
Taking as a starting point the expansion of the city of Marrakech to the South and its relationship to its Ourika River and surrounding Oueds, Manar Moursi alongside workshop participants will have been engaged in a meditative exploration of this river and its surrounding extended ecology.
Manar Moursi is a Kuwait-born Egyptian-Canadian architect, researcher, and artist. Her diverse artistic portfolio spans the mediums of video, film, installation, performance, photography, artist book, and writing. Her work, which draws on her background in architecture, often investigates the dynamics of gender and power within public spaces.
In addition to her artistic practice, Manar is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Art and Architectural History, Theory, and Criticism at MIT. Her research there is guided by eco-critical, feminist, and decolonial lenses. These scholarly framings inform her artistic practice, particularly in her latest projects, which probe the intersections of power, personal history, and the ordinary objects and spaces of everyday life.
Manar has presented her work in venues across the Middle East, Mexico, Canada, and Europe. Her artistic work has received support from institutions such as AFAC, Mophradat, the Canada Council, as well as the Toronto, Ontario and Quebec Arts Councils. She is the recent recipient of the prestigious Schnitzer prize and is a Harvard film fellow, as well as a resident at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 2024.
____________________________
The Collective Workshops of Dar Bellarj are conceived as an alternative school, as a space of transmission, experimentation and production of ideas, knowledges and visions that find their inspiration in traditional forms of cultural transmission, translated and rethought through tools and languages mediated by contemporary (particularly artistic) practices and researches.
The workshops and seminars address the large community of Dar Bellarj, composed of kids, teenagers and (particularly) mothers living in the medina (old town) of Marrakech. Raising from key questions and fractures traversing and affecting the city. The workshops are imagined as temporary assemblies, as working groups and as moments of horizontal learning and exchange of tools and knowledges between the participants and the invited speakers.
