Untitled

This film is a part of a project in progress. It presents the beginning of a giant construction site in Morocco, near to Ouarzazate, for a future city of 70,000 inhabitants. On this plateau at the edge of the Atlas, appear the first infrastructures: roads, lighting, sewers...Carried out by public works contractors, this new installation has not long been implanted in the middle of the desert.

At the moment of this shot, these hints of a city have something absurd. Without life or social body, they remain cemented in a sort of frozen temporality. The place thus evokes a strange compound: it has something of the conquest of the empty plains of the New World, or the post-war reconstruction projects, else the intensive urban planning in China ... Yet the context is quite different. Designed as low architecture, these assertions of construction have their own singularities. The expanse strangely combines its old and new legends: fitting in both with the dated modern architecture of the mid-20th century and the reality of contemporary Moroccan society.

But it also raises a great number of questions about its organization and implementation. The area refers to the endless affinities that make up the hybrids of Bruno Latour and Philippe Descola’s wiping of the distinction between nature/culture. All of its boundaries are blurry and moving. The geometry of the place is reversed: from the solid and the void, from the inside and the outside, from the social and the mineral: the city is geology and vice versa.

Has been liked by 2

Comments 0

Say something

You must login or Sign Up to write a comment Join