26/08/2026
My reportage "Oued Zat, Last Harvest" has received an Honorable Mention in the Documentary category of the Maghreb Photography Awards 2026. Thank you to the jury and see you next year!
This series follows the Oued Zat plain in Morocco, where the Barrage Ait Ziat was nearing completion in January 2026. Presented as part of a wider strategy of water security, the dam would inundate villages shaped by olive cultivation. Land was expropriated with compensation, not without contestation. The inhabitants were asked to leave, and the villages were demolished, making return impossible even before the water arrived.
I photographed the valley when the demolition was almost complete. Families, still bound to the land, kept coming back to groves already taken from them, for their last olive harvest. At first glance, the atmosphere could resemble a picnic: elders seated on tarps, children lingering nearby, a small stove ready for lunch, and the ever-present tea. But this intimacy unfolded among endless rubble, abandoned domestic objects, and the certainty that the place was about to disappear. I was struck by this stubborn continuity of gesture: harvest continuing inside a landscape already condemned.
What interests me here is not only the violence of disappearance, but the uneasy coexistence of scales: infrastructure and intimate attachment, compensation and grief, national necessity and rooted life.
These photographs record a threshold: not yet flooded, no longer fully inhabitable. They ask what remains of belonging, memory, and heritage when a rural world is dismantled before the water rises, while presence still lingers in the trees, in the gestures of harvest, and in the invisible yet profound bond between people and place.
MAGHREB (AFRICAN) PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS
