The centuries-old oases of the Sahara's Maghreb region are shrinking. Owing to rising temperatures and inadequate rainfall, this terrain – striking in contrast to its arid surroundings – has in recent decades begun to thin out and dry up, posing an existential threat to the communities that have long depended on it.

In Morocco, nearly two-thirds of desert oases have vanished over the last century, and its roughly two million inhabitants are being pushed to migrate for economic survival. In his project Wah'a, meaning 'oasis' in Arabic, Seif Kousmate addresses the enduring histories and endangered present of five oases across Morocco: Tighmert, Akka, Tata, Aguinane, and M'Hamid El Ghizlane.

Kousmate began visiting these regions in 2020, talking to the people whose social, cultural, and agricultural heritage is tied to them. Initially conceived as a straightforward photo-documentary project, Wah'a quickly grew into a composite of archival, visual, literary, and physical materials centred around Kousmate's medium-format images.

'Making people think is more important than making photographs', he writes in one of his early planning notes. He aims to encourage a kind of thinking that occasions action – and, crucially, action that is not simply a front for saviourism, spokesmanship, public relations, or posturing.

Between early colonial travel writing and Fauvist landscapes, depictions of North-African oases have produced an Eden-like image of a topography replete in beauty and orientalist wonder, inhabited by people who have seemingly been made either incidental to its histories or entirely othered by them. As a corrective, Kousmate's approach centralises people – their fears, aspirations, disappointments, and daily lives – in an attempt to present a realistic portrait of contemporary life in Morocco's oases.

For instance, he photographs two brothers from the Tighmert oasis, Hassan and Abderrahman, whose lives were irreversibly altered after the death of their father in 2013. While Hassan left school to help care for the family, his younger brother still hopes to find a way out and join their older siblings abroad.

The desire to leave, echoed by many younger people in the region, underscores a rift between an older generation fearful of losing their cultural heritage and a younger generation more pessimistic about their future. In relaying these nuances, Wah'a rejects one-dimensional representations of the oases, often seen as terrains of aesthetic desire rather than material subsistence.

In addition to his images, Kousmate also includes organic elements such as soil, dry dates, and dead skin from palm trees to produce a more intimate and physical link with the oases he has photographed. In a few instances, he uses a small jeweller's torch to produce clusters of orange dots over the surface of his images before scanning them, resulting in photographs seemingly pockmarked by embers.

Other prints are washed in hydrochloric acid, after which Kousmate digitally photographs their deterioration before they are entirely subsumed in kaleidoscopic purple. The final image of the project, which is almost entirely destroyed, presents a dramatic warning – metaphor made tactile. With an eye to the past and another to the future, Wah'a insists on the informative and affective potential of images, and reminds us of what is at stake in a warming world.

This text is an excerpt of an article written by Varun Nayar about Seif Kousmate’s project WAH’A originally published in Foam Magazine 61, Talent, in 2022.

SEIF KOUSMATE (1988) is a visual artist born in Essaouira and living in Tangier, Morocco. In 2014, he quit his civil engineering career and bought his first camera at 26.  As a self-taught artist, he began his journey into photography by exploring documentary photography. His lens was focused on capturing the diverse manifestations of marginalization in Africa.  His early projects served as a platform for the narratives of Rwandan youth post-genocide, formerly enslaved people in Mauritania (Haratins), and Subsaharian migrants in search of a better life in Europe.  In Morocco, Seif's work revolved around Boujloud celebrations and documented the lives in the Atlas Mountains facing climate change. He is currently working on his series Waha واحة and his first monograph, a four-year essay on the oases and the changes they are facing.  Seif's artistic practice has evolved over the past decade, now intersecting with contemporary art and photography. His upcoming project explores masculinity and fatherhood, pushing the boundaries of photography into the realm of installation artwork and video. 

VARUN NAYAR is a writer and editor based in Delhi.