Facilitators’ bios

Dr. Kenza Benabderrazak is a researcher focusing on the interplays between socio-ecological dynamics within agrifood systems. In her teaching and research, she employs decolonial and feminist approaches and explores political ecologies and alternative governance structures.

Kenza currently teaches in the Sustainable Agroecosystems Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich and coordinates projects for scientific outreach related to food security and agroecology.

Ahmad Nabil is a visual artist, educator, and researcher in the fields of Arab and Islamic mythology and paranormal phenomena. His work focuses on their relationship to land, natural resources, and their integration into intangible heritage for the preservation of land and collective memory. In 2015, he founded The Fiction Council in Jerusalem, a non-profit organization aiming to reconnect Palestinian communities with their rich imaginative heritage, recognizing imagination as a powerful tool for cultural resilience and change. Ahmad is also one of three of The Rain Collectors, together with Dima Srouji and Emilie Glazer.

Bint Mbareh is a sound researcher with a focus on water in Palestine. Her interest in the physical parallel between the water wave and the sound wave leads her into questions of border dissolutions (between bodies, between states, between tenses), and into the possibility of being enveloped by the voice, by sounding communally similar to being enveloped by a water body. She challenges settler colonial epistemology by taking seriously Palestinian ways of knowing, from rain-summoning music to shrine pilgrimage as an instigator to political revolution.

Elena Stecca is a PhD candidate in Environmental Anthropology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, researching agriculture, extractivism, and environmental imaginaries in arid lands, with a focus on Morocco. Her ethnographic work combines decolonial methods, audio-visual experimentation, and attention to multispecies relations, informed by her experiences as a farm worker and olive grower. She does her best to approach research as a way of holding space for new possibilities, building connections, and experimenting with collaborative practices that support environmental and social justice.

Omar Moujane is an Amazigh activist focusing on ecology, extractivism and subaltern resistance. He was an active participant in the “Movement on the road ’96”. A researcher in sociology with experience in documentary film and social work, he holds an MA in sociology from the University of Cadi Ayyad, Marrakech. He recently contributed to the collective volume Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today (MIT Press), reflecting on a collectively produced film documenting the Imider movement. With QANAT, Omar has worked on topics including marginalization, the archiving of oral histories and poetry, environmental justice and ecological knowledge. Since the 2023 earthquake, he has been working in the Al-Haouz with non-profit organizations engaged in poverty alleviation and health relief efforts.

Sara Frikech is an architect and historian whose work explores the intersections of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure in North Africa. Trained at TU Delft, she investigates how colonial modernization has shaped urban and rural environments, with a particular focus on hydraulic infrastructures in Morocco. Her doctoral research at ETH Zürich, Tamed Waters: Ordering Meknes and its Hinterland (1912–1956), examines the spatial, political, and ecological dimensions of water systems during the French protectorate. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability at ETH Zürich and the editor of Delus magazine. Through her writing, exhibitions, and collaborations—such as with the collective Qanat—Frikech combines historical research and artistic practice to question how architecture mediates relations between resources, territory, and power.