AZ OOR (b. 1992, Aghmat, Morocco) is a visual artist, noisist, storyteller, and poet living between Marrakech and Rotterdam. An Amazigh Futurist, AZ OOR’s practice operates at the intersection of fiction, history, and futurity. It is grounded in narrative speculation and a critique of the material and temporal conditions of the Developmentocene, a colonial and terraforming sphere that tends to accelerate, break, mine, disintegrate, and devitalize sentient and vibrant life into raw material, pure matter, and energy.
Through oral storytelling, archival material, and scenographic interventions, AZ OOR engages the entangled relations between political imaginaries, land, and Indigeneity from the Maghreb (North Africa as a site of participation in the world). Their visual and sonic vernacular oscillates between quasi-theatrical forms, fragmented texts, and scenographic vocality, articulating an Amazigh future that has not yet happened and a nostalgia for something that did not exist, combining to create resurgent worlds where new forms of coexistence can be rehearsed.
AZ OOR advocates for a right to space-fiction: the right to imagine, produce, refuse, and inhabit worlds of re-enchantmentThis exploration unfolds through a constellation of works: Oukaimeden (Stargate) investigates UFOlogy and monarchic techno-utopianism; The Fable of the Agronauts gathers wandering peasants, the doubly-dispossessed, and Berber pirates in storytelling circles; Issaffen N Irifi (Rivers of Thirst) invokes insurgent rams and sentient waters as acts of survivance; Sonic Fossils explores sound, electricity, and Amazigh imagination; and Al Falak Al Majdoub (The Entranced Orbit), a proto-Sufipunk program, reimagines modernity as a theology of electricity and cyberspace as a site of sovereignty.
