Temporary Studio view at Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastrich 2023
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AZ OOR (b. 1992 Aghmat, Morocco) is a visual artist, storyteller, and poet currently living between Marrakech and Rotterdam. An auto-proclaimed Amazigh Futurist, AZ OOR advocates for a poetic resurgence of indigenous consciousness and thinking processes within the Developmentocene- a temporal, narrative, colonial, and terraforming sphere that tends to accelerate, break, mine, disintegrate, and devitalize the sentient and vibrant life into raw material, pure matter, and energy.
By contemplating and listening to events, orality, archival material, plants, bestialities, ethnographical sludge, viral thoughts, cinematic crufts, and literary figures, AZ OOR’s visual vernacular oscillates between quasi-theater forms, fragmented texts, and scenographic vocality to articulate a living vocabulary for an Amazigh future that hasn’t yet happened and a nostalgia for something that didn’t exist.
AZ OOR’s recent body of work comprises: Oukaimeden (Stargate), a series of photographic-found-objects-collages and readings on UFOs, monarchic techno-utopianism, and Berbericerlation (an Amazigh perspective on accelerative forces of development policies in Morocco); The Fable of the Agronauts (wip) weaves together investigations into figures and motifs: The wandering peasant (Fellah Menkoub), the doubly dispossessed, the condition of being dispossessed at the same time from one’s mother tongue and one’s land, and the Barbaresque, or the Berber Pirate. These investigations are articulated in the form of speculative storytelling circles where creatures, myths, documentary elements, and characters are invoked to save the earth from its combustion.
Issaffen N Irifi (Rivers Of Thirst in Amazigh) a space-fiction on indigenous survivance, "By invoking elements on recovering lost geometries, on technologies beyond the wheel, on insurgent rams, proto-tribal machines of defense, petrified yellings from cliffs, iron birds, and water as a sentient entity. A space-tale where the precolonial past becomes present and a present as a renewed gift to inspire programs of possibility. And Sonic Fossils a research project exploring the intersection of sound and electricity in the Amazigh imaginative landscape
AZ OOR has exhibited, performed, and lectured internationally at venues including Drawing Room UK, MMVI of Modern & Contemporary Art Morocco, Le18 Marrakech, Crac Occitanie and Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Market Gallery Glasgow, Chapter Arts Center, Wales, Casco Arts in Utrecht. He have also participated in international artist-in-residency programs, including the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Moussem Nomadic Arts Center in Brussels, Matadero Madrid, Queens Collective in Marrakech, and Mothership in Tangier, among others.
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| Portrait at Surface Studio In Marrakech by Salah Aouad |
