Art and Natural Resources: When Sculpture Enters into Dialogue with Water and Earth

Creating an institutional work is always a special moment in an artist's life. It is an invitation to step out of the protected space of the studio and place one's work in a context where it must speak to a broader public, often unfamiliar with contemporary art. When I was invited to create the Trophy for the Salon International de l'Agriculture au Maroc — the SIAM — around the themes of water and earth, I felt both the excitement of that opening and the responsibility it implied. Agriculture, water, earth: these are not abstract themes in Morocco. They are vital, political, cultural realities that touch the very identity of the country. How does one approach them artistically without reducing them to a decorative metaphor?

My answer was to dig into matter rather than represent a concept. I did not want to paint an agricultural landscape or sculpt a stylised water droplet. I wanted the work itself to be an experience of telluric matter — so that the viewer, looking at it, might feel something of the density of earth, the transparency of water, the tension between drought and fertility. Cellulosic paint, with its possibilities of stratification and internal light, gave me the tools to build that experience. The works created for SIAM are thus works of surface and depth: the visible surface is only the summit of an accumulation of layers, just as the earth itself is the visible result of geological accumulation.

The dialogue between art and natural resources is not new in the history of Moroccan art. The Casablanca School had already posed the question of the relationship between pictorial gesture and natural matter, between plastic form and territory. Belkahia worked copper, explored natural dyes. Hamidi sought in calligraphy a connection between the human sign and the forces of nature. I situate myself in that continuity while inflecting it toward contemporary concerns: the question of water in Morocco, hydric stress, the transformation of agricultural landscapes under the effects of climate change. Art does not solve these problems, but it can make them sensible, give them an existence beyond statistics and technical reports.

The public dimension of this project has also transformed the way I conceive my work. In the context of an international fair like Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Paris Internationale or Kunst Rai Amsterdam, the viewer comes seeking an aesthetic and intellectual experience. At SIAM, they come first for agriculture, and the artwork makes them an unexpected proposition. I love that friction. It obliges me to create works that do not presuppose an informed audience — works that must function on several levels simultaneously: as pure visual and material presence, as reflection on the relationship with nature, as objects of collection and institutional representation.

These works have been integrated into collections that testify to the vitality of contemporary Moroccan artistic creation — alongside works preserved in institutions such as the Mohammed VI Museum in Rabat and the Bank Al-Maghrib Museum. For me, public sculpture and institutional projects are not parentheses in a practice oriented toward international recognition alone. They are the constant reminder that art has a role in the city, in collective memory, in the way a society thinks and represents itself. Water and earth are Morocco's raw materials. They deserve works equal to their measure.

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