Awal
Morocco
Cinema,Performing Arts,Literature,Visual Arts,Music,Education,Cultural Heritage,Design,Knowledge Production and Research,Publishing,Sociology,Audio Production,Archiving
AWAL is a project initiated by the Tizintizwa collective in 2019, focusing on transmitting, reactivating, and archiving the Moroccan oral heritage by fostering the conditions for intergenerational exchange and “bottom-up” creation. It spearheads and backs a collective effort in field research and creative projects on popular “oraliture” through workshops, residencies, and training while opening conversations to the wider public through programming, exhibition, and publication. AWAL posits the necessity of documenting and building up an archive of ancestral and popular oraliture as an invaluable common resource. It continuously reactivates this heritage by inviting artists and researchers to collaboratively think and create from it. At the heart of AWAL lies a southeastern proverb, “tar izli urtamou” – an event without its poem is an event that never happened. Driven by this maxim, AWAL posits oraliture as an immaterial commons of popular cosmologies and histories as they are recounted by entire communities and peoples. Championing the ideas of post-colonial artists, AWAL also tends to combine academic with artistic formats which promote orality as a model for cultural production and artistic creation in the region. Our purpose is thus to reflect on, experiment with, adapt and put oraliture into practice as a means of challenging its folklorization and confinement to being a mere artifact of the past.
Awal
Morocco
Cinema,Performing Arts,Literature,Visual Arts,Music,Education,Cultural Heritage,Design,Knowledge Production and Research,Publishing,Sociology,Audio Production,Archiving
AWAL is a project initiated by the Tizintizwa collective in 2019, focusing on transmitting, reactivating, and archiving the Moroccan oral heritage by fostering the conditions for intergenerational exchange and “bottom-up” creation. It spearheads and backs a collective effort in field research and creative projects on popular “oraliture” through workshops, residencies, and training while opening conversations to the wider public through programming, exhibition, and publication. AWAL posits the necessity of documenting and building up an archive of ancestral and popular oraliture as an invaluable common resource. It continuously reactivates this heritage by inviting artists and researchers to collaboratively think and create from it. At the heart of AWAL lies a southeastern proverb, “tar izli urtamou” – an event without its poem is an event that never happened. Driven by this maxim, AWAL posits oraliture as an immaterial commons of popular cosmologies and histories as they are recounted by entire communities and peoples. Championing the ideas of post-colonial artists, AWAL also tends to combine academic with artistic formats which promote orality as a model for cultural production and artistic creation in the region. Our purpose is thus to reflect on, experiment with, adapt and put oraliture into practice as a means of challenging its folklorization and confinement to being a mere artifact of the past.
Grantee
Reclaiming Our Commons: A Proposal for Cultural Collaboration Across the Arab Region
2024
AWAL Archive & Catalog
Between 2017 and 2023, AWAL accumulated recordings of over two hundred ancestral and popular oral poems, ballads, work songs, folktales, legends, and oral history interviews from across the Eastern High Atlas, Middle Atlas, and Southeastern Morocco, towards establishing a participatory oral arts archive. These efforts emerged following a series of “igrawen” (ancestral southeastern Moroccan community assemblies with horizontal, consensus-based structures) involving practitioners of ancestral and popular oral art forms, as well as researchers and visual artists from or based in rural regions. To ensure an inclusive process in which those who record, the individuals recorded and the communities that created the oraliture in question over generations maintain agency over their voices, AWAL has been striving for technical and ethical approaches to archive communitarian, ancestral, and popular artistic expressions as cultural commons, which by its very nature defies the Western conception of intellectual property. This project entails two complementary processes. The first is collecting, archiving, and cataloging oraliture, while the second focuses on organizing, compiling, and mapping a comprehensive catalog of existing archives. This will lead to the production of three common resources: an online oral art archive catalog that will include institutional repositories in Morocco and abroad; a consultable archival repository as a platform for direct consultation and voluntary submissions; and the publication of a handbook on fieldwork methodologies specifically adapted for the oral arts in the Moroccan, and eventually, North African and West Asian context. The handbook will be a precipitate of the ideas and debates of the “igrawen” and will be available as an open source, making it an essential tool for any individual or group seeking to document oraliture or build their own individual, local, or regional oral heritage archives. It would also be a guide to anyone who wants to collect in order to contribute to AWAL’s common archive in the future.