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IN PRAISE OF FOG

Tagut, the fog of the Anti-Atlas

At first, Tagut was something to endure.

Then it became something to understand.

Then something to work with.

And eventually, something that taught us.

Tagut

In the Anti-Atlas, it arrives from the Atlantic and rolls across the mountains, filling valleys, softening the contours of the land and making familiar places strange again. It moves like a slow sea of whiteness—silent, immense and fleeting. A tree becomes a brushstroke, a mountain disappears, and a human figure dissolves into the distance.

For generations, the people of Aït Baâmrane have lived with this presence. They call it Tagut. It was not traditionally welcomed; it could make paths slippery, dampen clothes and endanger the lives of animals, obscure the landscape and add hardship to everyday life. Water was precious; fog was not necessarily understood as water.

And yet, within this elusive phenomenon was something extraordinary: water suspended in the air, returning again and again to the land known as dry.

Uncertainty

For the Aït Baâmrane, fog is Tagut. The word carries more than the name of a weather phenomenon. It belongs to a wider way of thinking about what is uncertain, imprecise or difficult to grasp. To say that something is “foggy” is, in a sense, to say that it pretends to uncertainty.

A traditional game played by children consisted of trying to imprison fog by putting it in a satchel of sunshine—an impossible task, perhaps, but one that symbolically turned something elusive into something to be played with, imagined and pursued.

There is something quietly revealing in this. What cannot be grasped can still invite curiosity.

Seeing Differently

Fog as Art
Another way of paying attention.
Check the work of some of our artists here

Nicola Baratto & Leonardo Ruvolo

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Photo by Salaheddine Elbouaaichi

Tears of fog

A research project by Nicola Baratto
In collaboration with Leonardo Ruvolo and Jamila Bargach
In partnership with Dar Si Hmad Foundation and Landescape Archive

Grounded in a belief in the invisible spirits of nature, this research observes other-than-human encounters, focusing on fog’s sentience as a natural and spiritual phenomenon. Tears of Fog transforms fog into a medium for sensory meditation by weaving a multidisciplinary approach composed of 16 mm film footage, photography, ambient sounds, text, sculpture, and installation based on Dar Si Hmad’s project in the Anti-Atlas. The research, at the intersection of science and art, seeks to think beyond the instrumentalisation of natural resources, instead considering fog as a living entity, engaging with the signs and spirits that inhabit it, contemplating its thoughts, attuning to its matter with a poetic approach. What connections emerge between water, air, memory, and imagination? What is the weight of fog?

This ongoing research is evolving through various formats and outputs. The project has been presented at various international symposiums, talks, and exhibitions at, among others, Museo Madre Napoli, La Mamounia Marrakech, Abadir Academy, and featured in international magazines such as Mousse and C41 magazine. In 2025, during the 1-54 art fair in Marrakech, the research converged in an ensemble exhibition at LE18. The show, initiated by Nicola Baratto, featured artists Raymond Gemayel, Rim Mejdi, Khalid Bouaalam, Yasmine Benabdallah, Fahmy Shahin, the ‘Not to be Published’ zine (aka Heiba & Ammanah Lamara, Arwa Aburawa & Mohamed), Franca Petroni, and Marijn Degenaar. The exhibition, curated by Leonardo Ruvolo and Francesco Masoero and designed by Alia Belgsir, has been supported by the Italian Council programme of the Contemporary Creativity General Directorate of the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Mondriaan Fund.

We are currently producing a documentary film and an artist book that will further expand the research, weaving together fieldwork, interviews, and sensory observations to compose a contemplation on fog and its fickle and sentient dimensions.

Paulina Hildesheim

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© Paulina Hildesheim, Monuments, 2025 – 2026

Monuments

IMAGE CREDIT INSTALLATION VIEWS
© Paulina Hildesheim, Installation View, Monuments, Installation view, Haus am Kleistpark, Mind the Gap, Berlin, 2026
Two-channel video installation, vertical 9:16 film on screen, square projection on gauze, sound, 9:30 min.

IMAGE CREDIT PROJECT PICTURES
© Paulina Hildesheim, Monuments, 2025 – 2026

WORK DETAILS & FULL CREDITS
TITLE Monuments
YEAR 2025 - 2026
LOCATION Anti-Atlas, Morocco
MEDIUM Photographic and moving-image work, Two-channel video installation
DURATION 9:30 min
FORMAT Vertical 9:16 film on screen, Square projection on gauze
SOUND Atmospheric soundscape, abstract voice-over, water, wind and environmental recordings
LANGUAGE English, with optional German Subtitles
MATERIALS Video, projection, gauze, screen, sound

EXHIBITION
Mind The Gap
Haus am Kleistpark
Berlin, 2026

RESEARCH CONTEXT
Dar Si Hmad, fog-harvesting project, Anti-Atlas, Morocco
Conversations with
Jamila Bargach
Mohamed Hamou Ali
Peter Trautwein
ARCHIVAL MATERIAL
Peter Trautwein

INTRODUCTION

Monuments is a photographic and moving-image work about fog collectors in the Anti-Atlas mountains of southwestern Morocco. The project observes these structures as fragile infrastructures of climate adaptation and as visual signs of a landscape in transition.

The work explores the fog collectors as lines, surfaces, textures, atmospheric conditions, and spatial structures, moving between nature, infrastructure, and abstraction.

PROJECT

The work explores a seemingly simple technology: extracting water from fog.

In the semi-arid mountains of the Anti-Atlas in southwestern Morocco, large-scale net structures stretch across the ridgelines. Their lines are etched into the rugged terrain like graphic markings, turning the landscape into a field of tension between nature, infrastructure, and abstraction.

The landscape appears dry; water is not a given here. And yet, in this place, water is extracted from air, wind, and fog. When moist air masses from the Atlantic drift across the mountains, the finest water droplets become trapped in the fibers of the nets. They condense, accumulate, and are channeled into a supply system. With the water, daily life also changes: journeys to distant wells are no longer necessary, and what is gained is not only a water supply, but also time.

The work follows this topography photographically. Rather than approaching the fog collectors as a purely technical solution, Monuments understands the nets as signs of a fragile adaptation to climate change and as visual traces of a landscape in transition.

Monuments conceives of the fog collectors as photographic and spatial signatures of a changing landscape - as silent monuments of adaptation to a future in which water is becoming an increasingly precious resource.

INSTALLATION

The two-channel video installation has a duration of 9:30 minutes and is structured around two moving-image surfaces: a vertical 9:16 film on a screen and a square projection on gauze.

The screen creates a concentrated, clearly framed image space. It holds the image with precision and directs attention toward detail, structure, and presence. The gauze projection remains permeable, unstable, and spatially open. It allows the image to dissolve into the surrounding space, echoing the material logic of fog, moisture, and disappearance.

Together, the two surfaces create a tension between fixation and dissolution, infrastructure and atmosphere, visibility and instability.

Monuments - Paulina Hildesheim – Trailer

Ana Rewakowicz

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Photo credit: Ana Rewakowicz

Misty Way

Misty Way (2016, 2019) is a collaboration between artist Ana Rewakowicz, Fluid Mechanics physicists Camille Duprat and Jean-Marc Chomaz
Sound composition: Daniel Schorno

Misty Way reconstructs the environment of capturing fog water with a textile net of parallel fibres. In this installation, water droplets in fog are metamorphosed into waterlight droplets (captured with a fast camera at high magnification) are collected by multiple screens made from parallel fibres, vibrating in the wind of fans. One hundred and twenty kilometres of thread, walked and stretched one by one, creates an inclined surface, which captures the waterlight drops that pass along and through the ‘textile’, casting a second projection on the floor covered in dark carpet. They literally splash on the viewer/participant creating an immersive environment where viewers are submerged in a virtual mist of widely spattered drops of light, shadows and sound - a musical composition of reconstructed noises recorded during scientific experiments, written specifically for the piece by electronic music composer Daniel Schorno.

Video Link
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Photo credit: Ana Rewakowicz

Nephelograph (Mist Impressions)

Nephelograph (Mist Impressions) — 2018
Collaboration between artist Ana Rewakowicz and Fluid Mechanics physicists Camille Duprat and Jean-Marc Chomaz
Sonification: electronic music composer Daniel Schorno

Nephelograph is a cloud machine that ‘writes’ different cloud formations. It consists of a number of stacked units made of clear Plexiglas and submerged ultrasonic misters that produce a stream of mist that bounces off an obstacle (a transparent plate), creating a turbulent mass. This ‘cloud’ is then pushed forward by fans through honeycomb filters, creating a uniform, homogeneous and controlled mist at the exit. Produced by the artists and physicists, together with the composer Daniel Schorno, this installation stems from artistic and scientific research into fog water harvesting and offers viewers a multisensory reflection on the arduous journey that awaits humanity in its quest for water. Viewers are invited to ‘touch’ the clouds and engage in a dialogue with them. In collaboration with children from the Paul Langevin School in Palaiseau, we invited them to write short poems for the clouds, using the machine’s sixteen compartments as an inscribing device to form typographic characters from an alphabet specially designed for the machine. These poems, printed letter by letter in the mist, created messages which, carried away and altered by the wind, echoed a desire to dream of a better future.

Video extract
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Photo credit: Ana Rewakowicz

Through the Looking Mist…

Through the Looking Mist… 2014 & 2018
Ana Rewakowicz in collaboration with Camille Duprat

Through the looking mist… is a large video projection of water droplet nucleation on parallel vertical fibres in slow motion (shot with a fast camera that can capture up to 10,000 images per second). Viewers are able to see drops slowly appearing, growing and then being pulled down by gravity. Through a change of spatio-temporal scale, this piece attempts to create a different relationship with water by inviting the viewer/participant to feel the phenomenon at the scale of a constitutive fog droplet to draw attention to the world where importance does not depend on size, but on the balance of forces. In the video, a growing tension, the anthropocentric feeling of resignation facing the ineluctable, gives rise to different formations and various rhythms, creating an ‘ode’ to the cycle of emergence and disappearance.

Video extract
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Photo credit: Ana Rewakowicz

Porous Sail / La Voila poreuse

Porous Sail / La Voila poreuse — Ana Rewakowicz, 2015

Porous Sail Prototype is a prototype of a new aerodynamic structure for collecting water from fog that uses flexible parallel threads and the mathematical concept of ruled surfaces to create a 3D shape from the movement of a straight line, like a thread. In this structure the thread twists around a central mast, leading downward to patterns of reversed curves cut into plexiglass panels that are positioned perpendicular to the lower end of the mast. Thinking aerodynamically, the mechanism of collecting water from fog presents an interesting dilemma. On one hand collection happens upon impact and on the other hand if a substrate is too solid, the wind sees it as an obstacle and avoids it. One of the possible solutions to this conundrum that the art and science collaboration has brought is the idea of a porous sail. Simply put, rather than going against the wind, we decided to go with the wind, just like a sail.

Dar Si Hmad thanks the artists for opening new vistas of conversation

The Experiment

Humans have been learning to live with atmospheric moisture for centuries. Across drylands, people have found ways to collect, guide or make use of water carried by the air—from the fog-catching traditions of the Kalahari to the legendary Garoé, the “tree of life” of the Guanches of the Canary Islands.

These practices remind us that the idea of gathering water from the air is not new. What is new is the possibility of bringing ancestral knowledge into conversation with contemporary science, materials and technology. In the Anti-Atlas, this led to a different question: what might become possible if we looked at Tagut with both kinds of knowledge?

The question was not how fog existed, but whether we could learn to work with it.

Dar Si Hmad brought together local experience, scientific observation and new technologies to explore what the fog of Boutmezguida might make possible. What began as an audacious experiment gradually became a working system—collecting water from the air and bringing it into the lives of the communities below the mountain.

The experiment did not replace what was already known—the humidity in the air—but it extended it.

Water

From Fog to Water
The fog was always there.

It moved across the mountain, disappeared into valleys, settled on vegetation and passed again. For the people living beneath Boutmezguida, it was part of the conditions of the place—sometimes inconvenient, sometimes unsettling, but not necessarily understood as a source of water.

The project did not create water where there was none. It changed the relationship between what was already present in the atmosphere and what could be made available on the ground.

At Boutmezguida, droplets carried by the fog began to meet a surface designed to catch them. They gathered, joined, flowed. What had existed as dispersed moisture became something that could be collected, directed and used.

But this transformation was not simply from fog to water. It was from atmospheric presence to shared resource—a change that depended on technology, observation, infrastructure, maintenance and, ultimately, people learning how to live with a different way of accessing water.

The People

From Technology to Trust
When changing access to water also changes relationships with water.

Water was never simply something women carried. In Aït Baâmrane, women were its guardians: they knew its sources, its rhythms and its needs, and much of household water management rested in their hands.

Bringing water inside the household could ease a profound burden of time and labour. But it also changed something deeper. If water no longer had to be sought, carried and carefully managed in the same way, what happened to the knowledge, responsibility and authority that had grown around it for centuries? This was one of the questions the project had to navigate. Women were not simply beneficiaries of a new water system. They were essential participants in shaping its place within community life.

The challenge was not only to bring water closer, but to ensure that the people who had always cared for it remained at the heart of its future.

A Living Laboratory

The mountain keeps teaching us.

Boutmezguida became more than the site of a water project. It became a place to observe, research and learn.

The mountain has long been a place of significance. In older local practices, Boutmezguida was understood as a sacred place. Today, it holds another layer of attention: fog is studied alongside the landscape that receives it—plants, animals, soils, weather patterns and the changing conditions of the Anti-Atlas.

We observe the movement of moisture through the atmosphere, as well as sand and mineral particles carried by the air, connecting the mountain to distant landscapes.

Researchers, students and practitioners meet here in different ways, each bringing their own questions, methods and forms of attention. Knowledge accumulates here not as a single body, but through encounters between people, place, observation and experience.

The work does not end when the water flows. The fog continues to give us questions.

What Changed

When possibility becomes lived experience.

The change is perhaps easiest to see in the ordinary.

Water reaches households where it once had to be carried. Time that was spent searching for and transporting water can return to household and community life. What began as an experiment has become part of the daily rhythm of the place.

But the change is not only measured in litres, hours or households.

A different kind of knowledge has accumulated: technical skills, research, community experience, new forms of observation and a deeper understanding of the relationship between atmosphere and landscape. The fog, once difficult to grasp, has become a source of water—and of questions, knowledge and possibility.

What happened at Boutmezguida also shifted the boundaries of what can be imagined in a dryland. Water does not come from one source alone. Atmospheric water can be collected and managed alongside groundwater and other forms of water security.

The significance of the project lies not simply in producing water, but in changing what people know to be possible—and in making that possibility part of everyday life.

KNOWLEDGE
A living body of research, community experience and technical learning.
View data sheet
ECOSYSTEMS
Greater attention to the relationships between fog, soil, vegetation, biodiversity and climate.
View data sheet
POSSIBILITY
A functioning example of working with the territory rather than against it. By working with water already present in the atmosphere, fog collection offers another way to work with water in drylands—alongside, rather than necessarily instead of, conventional sources such as groundwater and desalination.
View data sheet

What Comes Next

Where knowledge becomes possibility.

The fog continues to change, and so must our questions.

We will continue to deepen our understanding of atmospheric water, improve how it is collected and managed, and explore where it can complement other forms of water security in drylands.

But the most important legacy of Boutmezguida is not a technology to be replicated everywhere. It is the knowledge gained from learning to work with a particular landscape, its climate and its people.

That knowledge can travel—not as a blueprint, but as a way of approaching places whose conditions are changing. Through research, experimentation, education and exchange, we can carry forward what Boutmezguida has taught us while remaining attentive to the differences between territories.

The next chapter is not about conquering the fog.

It is about continuing to learn from it.

We did not invent the fog. We learned to listen to it.

BUILDING THE FUTURE TOGETHER

Our work is built through relationships — with the people who live in the territories where we work, with researchers and universities, with technical partners, institutions, funders and others who bring knowledge, resources and perspectives that we do not have ourselves.
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