Part of the Public Program of Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song
Wednesday–Saturday, 7–10 May 2025, 16:00–19:00 / Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA Utrecht
You’re encouraged to RSVP via info@casco.art to secure your spot, yet spontaneous participation — including bringing your friends, a neighbor, or family — is warmly welcomed!
Food and tea are provided.
Schedule per day:
16:00 Walk-in and exhibition visits
17:00 Storytelling session starts
18:30 Tea
As part of his artistic proposal for Sensing the Ways, AZ OOR presents Issaffen n Irifi (Rivers of Thirst in Amazigh), a four-day program centered around Amazigh Futurism and world-building practices. Taking place at sunset through a series of storytelling circles, the program unfolds over four days, offering multiple entry points.
Combining imagination, materially rooted knowledge, poetics, and embodied practice, AZ OOR’s storytelling engages with the struggles and histories of the Amazigh people, weaving past, present, and future into narratives of their resilience and refusal.
Issaffen n Irifi is an episode of The Fable of the Agronauts, a space-fiction on indigenous survivance. The historical and cultural experience of the Amazigh community is the fable’s anchor. Amazigh or Imazighen (also known as Berbers) are the proclaimed indigenous communities of North Africa. By gathering and activating the Amazigh community’s scattered archives, AZ OOR’s practice uses storytelling to foreground this transnational movement.
The Fable of the Agronauts is a series of sceneries and storytelling circles in which narration becomes a vehicle for reimagining Amazigh agropunk futures. It bridges oral and written traditions to re-articulate attachment to a land shared by all members of the Amazigh, Arab, and African diaspora. In the face of ecological crises, ongoing forms of colonialism, economic injustices, and the inevitable destruction of land, The Fable of the Agronauts pays homage to the Amazigh people’s struggle for solidarity beyond exceptionalism.
One episode of the fable, Issaffen n Irifi is set in dry geographies. Water is thus the thread weaving together all four circles that make Issaffen n Irifi. Its tales move on the rhythm of water uprisings and at the pulse of the thirsty and the defiant, crossing water archipelagos. Issaffen n Irifi evokes lost geometries, technologies beyond the wheel, insurgent rams, proto-tribal defenses, petrified cries from cliffs, iron birds, and water as a sentient entity.
Drawing on letters, documents, rumors, and remembered conversations gathered by the artist, Issaffen n Irifi introduces the intertwined stories of five characters: Idriss, a tailor and writer; Jimmy (Jamal), a Marxist-Leninist student from Zagoura; Nordin, a Source-erer skilled in divination; Lalla Fadma, a dreamer and historian; and the unnamed narrator. Told by the artist in an evolving scenography, the tales of these figures offer new perspectives on geographies, dimensions, and ways of knowing that are all rooted in Amazigh imaginaries.
The following circles dive into specific themes, each rooted in the histories, struggles, and cultural practices of the Amazigh people. Below are the themes listed per day. To participate, please RSVP by emailing info@casco.art. We envision these storytelling sessions as warm and welcoming gatherings, where spontaneous decisions to attend — and to bring friends, a neighbor, or family — are genuinely appreciated.
Circle 1: The Lock and the Barbary Fig
7 May, 16:00–19:00 / Casco HQ
This is Jimmy’s story. While Jimmy recounts the water crisis in his home palm grove, caused by watermelon farming, another narrative unfolds in a neighboring village. Here, writer and locksmith Idriss embarks on his journey against the Agency of Chronophages. This circle unveils the Lock and delves into rumors of agricultural sabotage, specifically the introduction of the Cochineal Insect—an insect responsible for destroying the communal lands of the Barbary Fig.
Circle 2: Arachnidian Rivers
8 May, 16:00–19:00 / Casco HQ
In this second circle, Nordin, from the Imssiwan tribe (The Irrigators), shares his knowledge of taryaft (dry body knowledge) and Aqqa (divinatory seed technology). He connects participants to subterranean rivers and a map of arachnidian rivers that reimagines alternative relationships between land, water, and survival.
Circle 3: The Stinging Tongues and Iron Birds
9 May, 16:00–19:00 / Casco HQ
In the village of Ait Deren, where farming and poetry converge, Lalla Fadma reflects on the origins of language and storytelling. She theorizes that storytelling arrived through language carried by iron and meteorites. Her memories of the earth swallowing iron birds allow her to recount the history of the pacification wars.
Circle 4: The Order of Yellow
10 May, 16:00–19:00 / Casco HQ
In Amazigh communities, yellow stands for sickness and is used to simultaneously refer to ethnographers. The circle unfolds amid a thirst uprising, sparked by those protesting the monopolization of water resources by the construction of a new golf project near Marrakech. Nordin is present among the protestors. Upon his arrest, he transforms into a sheep, surrounded and studied by ethnographers. In an effort to protect his history from their gaze, he becomes a bibliophage, devouring manuscripts.
