Paper short abstract:

New agricultural plots have recently mushroomed in the surroundings of southeastern Moroccan oases. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Drâa River Basin, this contribution thinks volumetrically and visually about the complex spatial experience of cultivating the desert.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, dwellers of drought-stricken Moroccan oases have witnessed, resisted, or contributed to, the mushrooming of agricultural plots beyond their palm groves’ edges. Endorsed by a representational rhetoric framing deserts as utopian sites of unexploited potential, these parcels are situated at the crossroads of tribal land usage regimes, neoliberal agrarian reforms, and new irrigation infrastructures for groundwater extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Drâa River Basin, this contribution thinks volumetrically and visually about the complex spatial experience of cultivating the desert. It attempts to tune into such experience through an engagement with water and the subterranean, based on experimental ethnographic writing and photography.

First, the contrapuntal reading of an oasis origin myth and of the geological account of the basin formation illuminates a long-gone waterscape – and its sedimented remains – as the material condition for the unfolding of desert agriculture. This contribution then builds on the emic distinction between l-fuq – the world above ground, where drought strikes –, and l-tht, the world below, where aquifer water lies in wait: for my interlocutors, the underground functions as an infrastructural frontier (Ballestero, 2019), the subterranean place where hope can be found against its above-ground fragility. Such distinction is elaborated upon through a photographic essay composed of dynamograms, that is, visual assemblages in which opposites remain co-present, in attunement with a context where scarcity and excess – just as modernity and its undoings – coexist and shape each other.