2024 ~ Meditations#13.5 ~ Harun Morrison on a presentation by COOP study group FOREST IS LONG-TERM.
DAI invited guest writers Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa, Harun Morrison, and Giulia Crispiani to meditate on specific parts of COOP SUMMIT 2024 which took place in Essaouira in Morocco on September 5, 6, 7, 2025. Five COOP study groups forged their collaborative research into an assemblage of public happenings.
Here Harun Morrison's experience of Moving with the Dunes, a presentation by COOP study group FOREST IS LONG-TERM.
A journey to the foresters house at Had Dra
The COOP gathering organised by Neringa Forest Architecture, who draw their own starting point from the Curonian Spit, a sand dune that separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea, were inevitably drawn to the peripheral landscape outside the city of Essaouira itself to perhaps find a poetic mirror [1] to their own starting points. This dislocation of a dislocation (the entire DAI student body being in a sense an itinerant body in Essaouira itself), found itself temporarily disconnected again from our base within the enclave we had spent the previous weeks.
Our journey to the foresters house at Had Dra oasis was mediated by a sonic meditation, fragments of audio description and music, reflections on the research processes, captured sounds, uncertainties and hesitations. It also seemed to parody the touristic experience of the janky ferry or view bus automated voice, that maybe long out of date, instead this was inverted, sensitizing and contextualized our road trip.
At the destination, the surroundings of the foresters' house elevated on a hill overlooking Had Dra oasis, we were offered a series of parallel tours. One of the grounds itself—the other into a house on the lands built in 1929 by French Forestry Administration led by Charles Watier, the house is now abandoned. [2] We were also gifted space and time to wander, to encounter site-specific installations, and canopy-like installations. Incidentally we were distracted by a tortoise, that wasn't part of any intended tour but there was the openness to be able to indulge in this discovery.
We were also invited into the house itself, it was built for monitoring the surrounding forests that were planted to manage the wind blown sand dunes. There were interesting rain water features which inverted what was inside and out of the forestry house.
Similar to Assembling Land there was a generous sense of hosting and a questioning as it felt to me of who had the right to host, or what does it mean to host when you yourself are a guest? A loophole was found in inviting those already working on the land, to in turn host us: Soufiane and Kaja, artists and landworkers, who also manage Azouka restaurant in Essaouira’s centre and have a tiny farm just few hundred meters away for the foresters house where they work land to grow variety of vegetables, experimenting with seeds and species of plants to sense which ones are best suitable for Had Dra oasis soil and conditions of high and constant wind that is blowing from the ocean just behind the hills. They shared a specially made fermented locally grown lavender drink and also broke from serving to welcome us and explain the work they have been doing growing and how this in turn is connected to their restaurant. They have also mentioned that the lavender usually starts thriving in this landscape when autumn rains resume after the scorching heat of summer that every year is getting more intense. Dring as taste of the surrounding landscape, soil…
The wind suddenly stopped and rain started pouring just at the moment when the visitors were boarding the buses in Essaouira, the last time it rained was back in February, seven months ago. It washed all the trees and colours, and smells came out, dust settled and the landscape of the oasis gained colours and gradients of red ground on the hills to the greenery down into the valley.
As a parting gesture we also received a publication [3] designed by Åbake, which again used the graphic language of 1980s postcards and travel agency brochures—to mock, acknowledge and warn against the tourist gaze. This included photographs and shot captions. Our return journey was accompanied by a sonic meditation part two, which similarly to the journey out, layered words and sounds, as we transitioned from a peripheral agricultural environment to the urban centre. The experience was necessarily fragmentary and full of deviations that led to both cul-de-sac, repetitions but also new mental spaces. Sound became the bridge between these interstitial spaces, physical and perceptual.
The rain stopped just after arriving back at Essaouira.
“How can we listen to archived sounds by removing their colonial perspective?
How can we have a sonic experience in Essaouira together?
Listen to the waves
Listen to the wind on the port
Listen to the medina?
How many layers of sound gather in a place?”
—quote from sonic meditation part 1
Notes:
[1] The landscape, just as in Curonian Spit was planted with forest too to stop the sand dunes, this performance-journey became also a reflection on how ideas on managing landscapes, regulating nature travel historically. Curonian spit was planted following forestry technology innovations in Germany and knowledge developed in Denmark and Holland back in 18th century, then adapted in Landes, in France, Atlantic coast in the 19th century (where Charles Watier learned the techniques) and reaching Essaouira in 20th century. For the study group this was somehow a reflection on the human-formed landscape.
[2] A young Water and Forestry engineer under the French Protectorate, he marked the history of Mogador by creating what would later become the green belt of Essaouira. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mogador was threatened by the dunes, the sand gaining every day from the land the city risks disappearing. The French administration, aware of this threat, appoints Charles, Maurice, and François Watier at the head of a vast project to stabilize the dunes. The development work includes the installation of a coastal cordon with the construction of an artificial dune to break the winds and stop the sand, to this is added the massive implantation of plants and shrubs: juniper, thuya, acacia, mimosa and other species to limit the movement of the dunes.
[3] The publication came as a result of an exercise proposed by Åbake called DEEP PUBLISHING, as “the rehearsal of a large editorial and publishing project.”
About the author: Harun Morrison
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