Monuments

Monuments is a photographic and moving-image work about fog collectors in Morocco’s Anti-Atlas mountains, observing them as fragile infrastructures of climate adaptation where water, landscape, technology, and daily life intersect.

Monuments is a photographic and moving-image work about one of the most vulnerable resources of our time: water.

In the semi-arid mountains of the Anti-Atlas in southwestern Morocco, large-scale net structures stretch across the ridgelines. Their lines are etched into the rugged terrain like graphic markings, transforming the landscape into a field of tension between nature, infrastructure, and abstraction.

Here, water is not a given. Rainfall is rare, and the landscape appears dry and barren. And yet, water is created in this place from air, wind, and fog. When moist air masses from the Atlantic drift across the mountains, tiny droplets become trapped in the fibers of the nets. They condense, accumulate, and are channeled into a supply system.

With the water, daily life also changes: journeys to distant wells are no longer necessary, and what is gained is not only a water supply, but also time.

The work follows this topography photographically: through lines, surfaces, textures, atmospheric conditions, and spatial structures. Rather than approaching the fog collectors as a purely technical solution, Monuments understands them as visual signs of a fragile adaptation to climate change.

The project is presented as a two-channel video installation with a duration of 9:30 minutes, combining a vertical 9:16 film on a screen with a square projection on gauze. While the screen produces a concentrated, clearly framed image, the gauze remains permeable, unstable, and spatially open.

The sound layer combines atmospheric recordings, abstract voice-over fragments, and environmental sounds such as water, wind, and surrounding textures. It does not explain the images, but opens a space of association around scarcity, adaptation, time, and the instability of atmospheric conditions.

Monuments conceives of the fog collectors as photographic and spatial signatures of a changing landscape as silent monuments of adaptation to a future in which water is becoming an increasingly precious resource.

Click here for the Trailer of the Installation.