Mirage

Mirage imagines a post-water future where women’s gestures become rituals, landscapes become neo-sanctuaries, and memory becomes a form of survival. Through film, photography and installation, it questions what we choose to preserve.

Mirage (2026) is a speculative project situated between photography, film and installation, imagining a future society shaped by the disappearance of water. Rooted in field research with Amazigh communities in Morocco and in the daily realities of women whose lives are deeply connected to the collection, circulation and preservation of water, the project asks a simple but radical question: what kind of world might emerge if water and the knowledge carried by women, were placed at the centre of our systems of value?

In this imagined post-apocalyptic society, ordinary gestures of survival become rituals. Walking, carrying, weaving, washing, giving birth, singing, harvesting and caring are transformed into forms of collective knowledge. Abandoned water towers, wells and water mills are reimagined as neo-sanctuaries: monumental spaces where memory, bodies, landscape and water converge.

Photography functions as both document and fiction. The images are constructed from real gestures, people, landscapes and traditions encountered during my research, but are displaced into a speculative future. I approach the photographs as fragments of an archaeological archive that does not yet exist : traces of a civilization that has reorganized itself around water, fertility, interdependence and transmission. The women become both subjects and carriers of this imagined history, their bodies echoing the geological transformations of the landscapes around them.

The installation extends this world beyond the photographic frame. Transparent plastic, transformed into sculptural costumes, becomes a material of contradiction: a contemporary waste product imagined as a resource in a water-scarce future. Its transparency and opacity evoke different states of water : liquid, membrane, skin, vapour, while allowing several women to inhabit the same garment. The costume can become a shared body, a collective skin, suggesting that survival is not individual but relational.

Through photography, sculpture, sound, costume and spatial installation, Mirage creates an environment where documentary evidence and speculative fiction overlap. Rather than predicting a future, the project uses an imagined one to look backwards and ask what our present has chosen to value, preserve and exclude.