Taming Water and Desert
The Colonialities of Water Extraction in Northeastern Libya
Sediments رواسب Part I, 2025
Shehrazade Mahassini PhD research Royal College of Art London This essay film based research investigates the role of Italian colonial water-extractive practices in shaping the postcolonial Libyan territory and its environmental consequences amidst the ongoing climate crisis. Drawing from Italian colonial archives and Libyan Indigenous oral history, it aims to show the continuity of land reclamation practices between the colonial and postcolonial and unearth the ideological, technological, and spatial colonial apparatus that enabled water extraction, management and distribution. With Two case studies in Northeastern Libya, the 2023 collapsed Derna dams and phase IV of the Great Man-Made River project, this research will demonstrate the environmental reverberations of Italian colonialism.
Project research conducted in collaboration with Adelita Husni-Bey supported by Sharjah Art Foundation.
Lectures Conversations Exhibitions
Spaces of Knowledge: Art, Urban Walking, and Empathetic Exchange, Royal College of Art, London, May 23, 2025
Anti-Extractivist Meeting: Artists, Activists and Curators organised by Frozen Future Project – Traces of Nitrate research collective, Royal College of Art, London, May 22, 2025
Take Back the Land, convened by Godofredo Pereira and Dubravka Sekulić with Shehrazade Mahassini, May 14, 2025
Water/Bodies/Colonial Continuum, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture and the City, TU Braunschweig, May 05, 2025
RCAxBASE, Making Kin, Salone del mobile, BASE Milano, April 7 – 13, 2025
Water Infrastructures within the colonial continuum: a conversation between Adelita Husni Bey and Shehrazade Mahassini, NERO Editions Magazine, conversation/world, Mar 2025
RCA Research Biennale 2025 Exhibition & Symposium, Feb 2025
PhD Research Work in Progress 3/3, Dec 2024
Land-made Lore: Shumi Bose with Marwa Arsanios and Shehrazade Mahassini, koozArch 4: Terra Infirma, Dec 2024
Adelita Husni Bey, Giulia Beatrice, Shehrazade Mahassini, La Collezione in Tumulto III – Infrastruttura, Locales and Museo delle Civiltà Rome, Jun 2024
DocTalks × MoMA, with Shehrazade Mahassini and Samarth Vachhrajani, May 2024
New PhD Research Projects 1/3, Oct 2023
Superstudio Forum 2, Lecture and exhibition DOMESTICATED FOODSCAPES with Pier Vitttorio Aureli, Martin Fröhlich, Nicola Braghieri, Joud Vergély Beaudoin, Lausanne, GOLDSMITH, Rotherham, META Architectuurbureau, Antwerp, Something and Son, London, Oct 2023
Artificial borders ignore matter's mobility and motility, conflicting with its very nature, not only in its ecological characteristics but also in the exogenic processes which shape matter over time and space.
Archival research IsIAO Rome
The collapsed Bu Mansur Dam, Derna November 6, 2024
Libyan short-story author and folklorist Ahmad Yusuf ‘Agila
Timeline of the Derna Dams collapse, Shehrazade Mahassini
Hellström, Bo. “The Subterranean Water in the Libyan Desert.” Geografiska Annaler 22 (1940)