AZ OOR (b. 1992 Aghmat) is a visual artist, storyteller, and poet currently living in Rotterdam. An auto-proclaimed Amazigh Futurist, AZ OOR advocates for a poetic resurgence of indigenous consciousness and thinking processes within the Developmentocene—a temporal, narrative, colonial, and terraforming sphere that tends to accelerate, break, mine, disintegrate, and devitalize the sentient and vibrant life into raw material, pure matter, and energy.
By contemplating and listening to events, orality, archival material, plants, bestialities, ethnographical sludge, viral thoughts, cinematic crufts, and literary figures, AZ OOR’s visual vernacular oscillates between quasi-theater forms, fragmented texts, and scenographic vocality to articulate a living vocabulary for an Amazigh future that hasn’t yet happened and a nostalgia for something that didn’t exist.
AZ OOR’s recent body of work comprises: Oukaimeden (Stargate), a series of photographic-found-objects-collages and readings on UFOs, monarchic techno-utopianism, and Berbericerlation (an Amazigh perspective on accelerative forces of development policies in Morocco); The Fable of the Agronauts (wip) weaves together investigations into figures and motifs: The wandering peasant (Fellah Menkoub), the doubly dispossessed—the condition of being dispossessed at the same time from one’s mother tongue and one’s land—and the Barbaresque, or the Berber Pirate. These investigations are articulated in the form of speculative storytelling circles where creatures, myths, documentary elements, and characters are invoked to save the earth from its combustion.
AZ OOR’s work has been exhibited across Morocco and Europe, including Drawing Room UK, MMVI d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Crac Occitanie, Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Market Gallery Glasgow, and has participated in several international artist-in-residency programs, including Matadero Madrid, Guest Projects, London, and Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.
