Soumeya Ait Ahmed und Nadir Bouhmouch (a.k.a. “Tizintizwa”) are storytellers, researchers and multi-disciplinary artists based in Marrakech. Their collaboration is based on their sense of urgency towards rapidly eroding ancestral, artistic, social and ecological practices and knowledge. Their work looks at how rural art forms have often been relegated to the category of folklore, which distorts their perception and questions their validity as contemporary art forms. While some of their artistic work, like “Apartheid Casablanca” (2020), “A (Rough) Seasonal Work Song” (2023) and “Atlas Reservoir” (2023) could be loosely defined as poetic political film, they have also researched and published photo essays, articles and short stories like “Before the End of the World: Art and Ideology in Bled Siba” (2019), “Quetzalcoatl’s Visit to Jbel Azurki: Or How Maize Came to Be Grown in the Atlas” (2022) and “Remedies for Monotony: Cultural Expressions of Class Conflict in the Apple Orchard” (2022). The focus of most of their work, whether visual, aural or textual, is almost always agriculture, ecological struggles, collective memory and popular history. However, while their filmic practice tends to consist of participatory processes which involve rural communities in the writing, production and even post-production; their textual and photographic practice is a more individual endeavor involving just the two of them. As programmers and curators, Soumeya and Nadir are also the co-founders of AWAL, an art and research residency and programme which trains researchers and artists to encourage audiovisual documentation of disappearing oral traditions in Moroccan rural areas. As part of AWAL, they have co-curated exhibitions including “All the Countries Without Legends are Condemned to Freeze to Death” (2021-2022) and “Timghi” (2020-2021) at LE18, Marrakech. As co-curators at LE18, their work, including performances, a public programme and an archival film library has been shown at documenta fifteen. They are currently showing at the 35th Sao Paulo Bienal and CIRCA Art.

“Our time at the residency was spent juggling several projects, including a film, a performance and a multi-medium exhibition. Our days in Schöppingen were thus divided according to each of these projects. Together, the scholarship and the large studio provided the mental space to dedicate ourselves entirely to this work.”