Rivering Together Pub — Manar Moursi

This work was developed collectively with participants, Hajja Fateha el Hallaj, Hajja Khadouj and Najma Batta, Randa Toko, Francesca Castegnetti and Matthijs Mantel. The zine was designed by Asma Oumahdi and Juia Fabricius. Photos by Gearbox, Cairo. Printed in Berlin, to order a copy please email.

Rivering Together - Publication Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2025

Born of a ten-day workshop I led at Dar Bellarj (Marrakesh), Rivering Together gathers artists, researchers, ethnobotanists, and community members who walked the dried Ourika–Issyl watershed to ask what it means to live with fading water. Hand-drawn botanicals by two of the workshop’s hajjas entwine with intimate photographs from participants’ personal archives, while essays, poems, recipes, and songs unfurl and cascade through a folding-accordion format that flows like the river itself. In my opening essay I frame walking, foraging, screening, and storytelling as decolonial-ecological practices that cast the riverbed as a space of shared relation. Matthijs Mantel’s “The Most Beautiful Flowers Have Thorns” links summer swims in the Dutch Kromme Rijn to drought-hardened burdock and thistle in the Oued Issyl; Randa Toko’s guided somatic meditation, accompanied by mallow and burdock infusion recipes, invites you to feel the waters within your own body; Francesca Castagnetti’s poem “Rooted” speaks of resilience in entanglement; Fateha El Hallaj’s memoir “From the Depths of the Dried Well” recalls a family courtyard well’s cooling gift and ancestral water wisdom; and Khadouj and Najma Batta’s translated Amazigh song “Oh Spring, Will You Pour Your Waters?” evokes communal yearning for rain. Grounded in feminist and decolonial methodologies, this collaboratively developed zine was conceptually designed by Asma Oumahdi and produced by Julia Fabricius.