Marrakech – This summer, the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) brings us a quietly radical exhibition by Austrian artist duo Hanakam & Schuller, in collaboration with curator Stella Reinhold-Rudas and the iconic Anima Garden.
It’s not just art — it’s a four-channel film installation that dares to ask: What does it mean to water beauty when the river’s run dry?
Running from July 7 to 10, the exhibition is MACAAL’s latest offering in its Artist Room series, and it’s anything but still life.
This is a moving image as protest, as love letter, as whispered resistance.
Set against the otherworldly green of Anima Garden, a kind of dream oasis just outside Marrakech, “The Water Cabinet” listens closely to the people who actually keep it alive.
Gardeners and technicians — Mohamed, Mustapha, Aziz, Abdellatif — speak in Darija and Amazigh, not with grand speeches, but with gestures: pruning, digging, adjusting a hose.
In a world of climate headlines and water wars, their daily rituals become poetry.
This isn’t just about drought. It’s about power — who controls the pipes, the pumps, the politics of water.
“The question of who has access to water…is a question of power,” the artists remind us. “Who can drill deep wells? Who has the resources?” In Morocco, in the wider MENA region, these aren’t theoretical questions. They’re survival.
Originally a continuation of their earlier project The Moist Cabinet (Freiburg, 2021), this iteration feels both more rooted and more urgent.
It shifts the lens toward an oasis garden with colonial echoes and post-climate realities. You see rose petals in a fountain. You also see a dry riverbed. It’s gorgeous, and it’s terrifying.
There’s a moment in the film where a gardener describes his tools the way someone else might describe a prayer book.
And maybe that’s the point: in “The Water Cabinet”, care is resistance. Maintenance is a ritual. And gardens are no longer just places of leisure, but living archives of inherited knowledge, ecological tension, and political complexity.
Curated by Stella Reinhold-Rudas and produced with Anima Garden’s Emanuel Rudas, the exhibition is backed by Austria’s Ministry of Culture — but it pulses with a distinctly local rhythm. You’ll feel it in the soil. In the silence between scenes. In the slow drip of water over stone.
A panel talk with the artists, MACAAL Artistic Director Meriem Berrada, and landscape designer Marius Boulesteix is also on the agenda, promising even deeper dives into decolonial ecologies and landscape futures.
Mark your calendars if you want to hear what gardens really have to say.
Because this show doesn’t just show us water. It makes us thirst for something better.
