About

QANAT is a collaborative platform that explores the politics and poetics of water to reflect and act (up)on the multiple contextual understandings and forms of (re)production of the commons in Morocco and beyond. A subterranean water-harvesting system of channels and wells across Africa, Southern Europe, the Americas, and Asia, the qanat are the embodiment of a social contract grounded in the communal and careful sharing of a scarce and essential resource. QANAT is moved by the urgency of tackling the multiple material, symbolic, and epistemic fractures produced by modernity, starting from the city and outskirts of Marrakech, and meandering into other geographies. Drawing from various forms of past and present knowledge on and acts of resistance and solidarity to dominant environmental narratives and injustices, QANAT aims to create spaces in which voices from Marrakech can speculate on new collective imaginaries to design new spatial and epistemological configurations for the city, and develop archives of resonant reflections and actions that knit together local struggles into transnational patterns to nourish debates across dispersed localities.