Issaffen n Irifi (Rivers of Thirst)
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| Room overview (2) Issaffen n Irifi at Sensing the Ways, Casco Art Institute, 2025. Photo by Chun Yao Lin. |
“Afrotopos is Africa’s atopos: the as-yet-inhabited site of this Africa to come.”
-Felwine Sarr
"We the Hole(s), in History, of History, a parasitic ontopology, we the Silence, the Strategic Silence, the Absence, We the Impossible, because the possible is already there, already made our world into ashes… Thus we should stand Poets from the rubble of modernity…"
Notes from the Fable of the Agronauts
At the heart of Issaffen n Irifi (Rivers of Thirst) lies a radical reimagining of history, ecology, and Indigenous futurism. This speculative episode of The Fable of the Agronauts, a space-fiction odyssey anchored in Amazigh survivance, invites audiences to traverse a world where ancestral wisdom and insurgent innovation converge. Named for the Amazigh words issaffen (rivers) and irifi (thirst), the project reanimates water as a sentient entity, a protagonist, and a metaphor for resistance in landscapes scarred by colonial erasure and ecological rupture.
A Space-Fiction of Survivance
The Fable of the Agronauts defies the confines of modernity’s “possible,” a world hollowed by extractivism and “earthlessness.” Instead, it dwells in what its creators term a “parasitic ontopology”: the silenced, the absent, the holes in History. Survivance here is an act of rebellion, reclaiming lost geometries, proto-tribal defense machines, and petrified cliffside cries to forge new paths. Through ecopoiesis, the creation of sustainable ecosystems, reimagined as a decolonial practice, the project bridges speculative storytelling and grassroots resilience, asking: How do we reclaim responsibility for History from zones of absence?
Storytelling Circles: Four Days,
From May 8-11, 2025, step into the speculative world of Rivers of Thirst. This four-day program unfolds through interconnected storytelling circles, blending oral traditions, archival fragments, and mythmaking to map Amazigh agropunk futures. Water, as lifeblood and antagonist, threads through tales of drought, defiance, and subterranean rivers, guided by five characters whose struggles mirror our own:
Idriss, a tailor and writer battling time-devouring entities.
Jimmy (Jamal), a Marxist student confronting ecological collapse.
Nordin, a diviner mapping clandestine aquifers.
Lalla Fadma, a historian weaving language from meteorites.
The Unnamed Narrator, a guide through shifting dimensions.
Circle 1: The Lock and the Barbary Fig
Jimmy’s home palm grove withers under watermelon monoculture, while Idriss confronts the Agency of Chronophages, enforcers of colonial amnesia. A tale of agricultural sabotage unfolds through the Cochineal Insect, a colonial import that ravaged Barbary Fig communal lands.
Circle 2: Arachnidian Rivers
Nordin, of the Imssiwan tribe, reveals taryaft (dry body knowledge) and Aqqa (divinatory seed technology), guiding participants through subterranean rivers and spiderweb-like hydrological networks.
Circle 3: The Stinging Tongues and Iron Birds
In Ait Deren, where poetry meets farming, Lalla Fadma traces language’s origins to iron and meteorites, recounting how the earth swallowed colonial machines during the Pacification Wars.
Circle 4: The Order of Yellow
Amid protests against Marrakech’s water-hoarding golf projects, Nordin transforms into a bibliophage sheep, devouring manuscripts to shield history from ethnographic extraction. Yellow, symbolizing sickness and ethnographers, becomes a hue of resistance.
A Transdisciplinary Call to Rewild the Future
Rivers of Thirst is not just a story. It is an invitation to join a transnational movement. By activating scattered Amazigh archives and diasporic solidarities, the project rearticulates attachment to land and water in the face of ecological crisis, imperialism, and displacement. Borrowing from ecopoiesis, it reframes Earth’s “dis-inhabitation” as a site for radical reinhabitation.
As the Fable’s notes declare: “We stand Poets from the rubble of modernity.” Here, poetry is a compass, guiding us toward an Afrotopos where ancestral rivers, real and imagined, quench the thirst of a world reborn.
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| Room overview (2) Issaffen n Irifi at Sensing the Ways, Casco Art Institute, 2025. Photo by Chun Yao Lin. |
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| Room overview (2) Issaffen n Irifi at Sensing the Ways, Casco Art Institute, 2025. Photo by Chun Yao Lin. |
