CATHARSIS
Curated by Margarida Mendes

An exhibition presenting the work of transdisciplinary research collectives, and solidary activist movements reporting from different bodies of water.

Margarida Mendes in dialogue with participating artists QANAT will lead a tour at 6pm on October 17.

With Ahmad Makia & Eduardo Cassina, Geochoreographies, entre—ríos, Maja Escher, Nandan Saxena & Kavita Bahl, Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White), Onaman Collective, QANAT Collective with Othmane Ouallal, Rim Mejdi & entangled ecologies (Oummahat dial Dar Bellarj, Abdellah Hassak, AZ OOR, Francesca Masoero, Louisa Aarrass, Sara Frikech), Water Map New Orleans / Bvlbancha with Kira Akerman & Monique Verdin.

CATHARSIS presents the work of transdisciplinary research collectives, and solidarity activist movements reporting from different bodies of water. These include artists, speculative designers, book makers, urban planners, filmmakers, geographers, weavers, and sound artists, among other collaborators. From rio Bogotá, to the Lower Mississippi river, Marrakesh’s palm groves to the desertified lands of the Gulf, or the Channelsea, these groupings relate to ongoing struggles taking place on hydrographic basins across the globe. They establish parallels between the occupation and expropriation of indigenous lands in the Great Lake region in North America, to the erasure of modes of living and land use knowledge in Narmada river in India, or the militarization and ecocide along the Mampuján region in Colombia, mirroring events occurring simultaneously across several geographies. Combating these modes of occupation with creative acts of response, the examples of hydric uprisings hereby presented call up for an abolition of borders and privatization of resources. As a resurgent power in flight, the aquatic element rises cathartically, through bodies and storms in motion, echoing demands for environmental and social justice.

“CATHARSIS” was originally commissioned for the 3rd Porto Design Biennial “Being Water: How We Flow Together and Shape Each Other” in 2023. The Marrakech iteration of the exhibition was produced in dialogue with Lorén Elhili & Francesca Masoero.

EVERYTHING THAT IS

In Palestine, there has been a proliferation of widely available videos and audio from the ground, resulting in a range of novel visual and journalistic practices. However, the wide dissemination of user-generated media, complemented with the hyper-restricted and engineered lack of direct access by human rights defenders and observers to Palestine has meant that most of these actors rely on tools from a distance.

The effect of these counter-forensic tools from a distance to tell the story of an ongoing genocide has often been the erasure of daily forms of resistance and the further dehumanization of Palestinians whose overstudied and hyper-surveilled lives are being increasingly reduced to the technical lens of rubble, misery, and humanitarianism.

The exhibited works, ‘Everything that is’ and ‘Camps on Campus’ are part of an effort by the artist and her collaborators in Palestine to subvert the media, cultural and political landscape within which Palestinian suffering is consumed, tallied, and visualized.

Starting from the ongoing daily and incremental efforts of Palestinians to resist Israel’s widespread and systematic attempts to render their spaces into a wasteland of ruins, rubble and remains, these works agitate the eco-colonial imaginary that has given shape to much of the produced academic, artistic, counter-forensic, and legal research on the genocide in Gaza.

“NO TRACES OF LIFE”
Exhibition by Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture’s (FA) presented work “No Traces of Life…” focuses on continuities in Palestine’s ongoing Nakba and its history of settler colonialism. This exhibition builds on FA’s previous works into herbicidal warfare in the occupied Gaza, examining the systematic targeting of orchards and greenhouses by Israeli forces since October 2023. With human rights groups and journalists denied safe access to agricultural areas along Gaza’s eastern perimeter, FA researchers reached out to existing collaborators at local farmers’ associations and through them, to agricultural workers in Gaza.

Within six months of the present genocidal campaign, Israel’s ground invasion had uprooted most of Gaza’s orchards and systematically targeted agricultural farmlands and infrastructure throughout the besieged strip. Where the ground invasion moved, environmental destruction followed, and farmlands were transformed into military forts. FA’s analysis revealed that this destruction is a deliberate act of Israeli ecocide that has exacerbated the ongoing catastrophic famine in Gaza and fits a wider pattern of depriving Palestinians of critical means of both present and future survival.

Together, these investigations also offer insight into the assembled techniques and grounded networks of relations that shape FA’s political, intellectual, and artistic matrix.

–

Forensic Architecture (FA) emerged as a critical practice dedicated to challenging settler-colonial violence in Palestine with locally situated counter-investigations. Its work has expanded globally to offer groundbreaking investigations into state, corporate, and colonial crimes. FA works in partnership with grassroots activists and legal teams, international NGOs, and media organisations and has contributed to some of the landmark cases of our time.

Forensic Architecture is also credited with the creation of a new eponymous form of interdisciplinary investigative practice. The group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, by cross-referencing a variety of evidentiary sources and methods, including situated witness testimony, new media, remote sensing, material analysis, and crowdsourcing.