Presented by Merath, CEN wa SAD traces the shifting landscape of movement, trade, and cultural circulation across the Sahel-Saharan region. Through archival fragments and fictionalised cargo records; from 19th-century Gum Arabic caravans to the stalled 1998 CEN-SAD treaty, the programme maps a long horizon of interrupted routes, unstable infrastructures, and the seismic “wobbles” that reshape how goods, documents, and ideas travel across the desert and the Mediterranean.

Merath operates from Libya: a place often treated as a corridor or proxy terrain, and one whose broken infrastructure forces cultural workers to rethink mobility altogether. With the promised CEN-SAD highway never realised and existing roads rendered unreliable by political and ecological shifts, merath turns instead to the logic of historical Trans-Saharan trade routes; out of pragmatism, not nostalgia, to make their practice possible.

For this public presentation, Merath transforms the stage into an assay office. Using balances, stamps, masking paper, and other tools of verification, they demonstrate the material methods that allow them to move and operate within a censored and constrained context. This is not a performance; it is a live, procedural demonstration of the logistics behind cultural work when the usual systems fail.

CEN wa SAD invites audiences to reconsider how culture circulates when roads collapse, archives go missing, and the map itself becomes a fault line, asking what new forms of weighing, recording, and rerouting become necessary in order to continue making and moving work.

Participants:

Moad Musbahi is a sound and installation artist, shaping the collective’s conceptual trajectories and its experiments with form, circulation, and material history. His practice brings together fieldwork, sound, image-making, and discursive inquiry to explore how movement, logistics, and memory structure cultural life across desert and Mediterranean contexts. He is also an anthropologist conducting doctoral research and teaching between Princeton University and the University of Algiers. 

Rawand Alhares is a filmmaker of the body, geography and gender. Her work moves between tacit research, visual storytelling, and collaborative production, helping to shape how merath’s research takes public form. She brings experience in media and  communication, having also worked on multimedia projects and community-focused narratives across different humanitarian organisations and contexts.

Malak L’Ajeli is a historian and experimental archivist engaged in how female labour and logistics can appear in institutional records. She develops merath’s strategy of working with dispersed records, oral testimonies, and ephemera to build the collective’s resources and catalogues . She has worked in museums focussing on documentation, cataloguing, and the politics of representation within fragmented archival landscapes. 

Halluma Seklani is a writer, image researcher and editor working across conflict and para-state environments. She creatively shapes and develops narrative structures that carry Merath’s projects into public form through text and audio that subvert bureaucratic protocols of censorship. She draws on experience in journalism and editing, having produced and refined stories for newsrooms and media platforms for diverse audiences in Norths of America and Africa.

Merath is a transregional art and research collective working itinerantly across the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea, with a permanent studio located in Tripoli, Libya. The collective functions as both an institutional platform that develops (im)material infrastructures that facilitate the circulation of cultural knowledge under conditions of constraint, and then as an art collective that uses that infrastructure for the production of art, exhibitions and performance works. Central to merath’s motivations is a commitment to transregional exchange, bridging neighbouring and resonant contexts to think of the interconnections across this sand and sea. Among its members are also Amira Zurgani, Mlak Elbuzidi, Amel Bensalim and Reda Tamtam.

Image: Playground at the Souk El Talat Roundabout, Tripoli, 2025. Courtesy of the Artists.

SEE ALL EVENTS