RRA

The Tamazgha (Maghreb) Region and the Amazigh Peoples


Project Researcher: RRA
Collaborator: Adjaye Associates 


This research project was a part of a series of research initiated in collaboration with the architectural practice Adjaye Associates. The research investigates the architectures and society of the Tamazgha Region of North Africa, historically known as the Maghreb. Tamazgha, the reclaimed term of the Maghreb by its indigenous peoples, encompasses the geographical areas between the Mediterranean Sea and the Niger River, with territory spanning Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Niger, Mali, Canary Islands, Egypt, parts of the Western Sahara, Burkina Faso and Senegal. Whereas all the other regions of the continent—the desert, forest, mountains and grasslands—are defined mainly on the basis of their climatic conditions, Tamazgha presented a fascinating example of a political, social, historical, cultural and linguistic entanglement, that meets at the intersection of this Northern Region.

RRA constructed a dynamic investigation located at the intersection between the history of the region through the movement of trans-Saharan trade; colonizations’s impact through the contemporary resistance of the indigenous population known as ‘Amazigh’; climatic research which situates the region in between Mediterranean and desert temperatures that architecture must now respond to; and historic methods and structures such as adobe dried mud-brick ksars and Troglodytes.

The research connected architecture and transient movements of trade through the region where ksars became institutions containing knowledge, libraries, spices and continuously oscillating, interacting, foreign objects and bodies.

“As bodies would come in, they would bring with them manuscripts of knowledge so that although the body itself would leave, the gift of a world view, a different spatiality, a perspective—would remain.”


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