Feda Wardak – Les sols ont vibré, 2024

The work of Afghan-French architect and artist Feda Wardak takes the form of large-scale landscape installations, choreographies and films. He is interested in models of community organisation that develop independently of government aid. Through the prism of political and social science, his collaborative artistic projects are intended to be investigations that tell the story of the invisible violence that affects inhabited environments.

Feda Wardak’s Les sols ont vibré (“The Ground Shook”) explores the destruction of Afghanistan’s karez — thousand-year-old underground waterworks — as a result of US Air Force drone attacks, and their reconstruction by local people. Wardak’s installation brings together and tensions between three spatial contexts: the sky, the ground and the subsoil. From the air, American forces exercise control, while the scars on the ground tell of the violence of the imperialist apparatus, while underground, the Afghan resistance is carried out by repairing these water galleries. Among the areas spared by the bombardments are the remains of ancient cities built by Alexander the Great, protected because they belonged to a Western civilisation. The artist seized on the motif of the column, the symbol of support in these Greek structures, to offer a different interpretation of the conflict. From underground, the columns support a fragile floor; while on the surface they disappear as they rise. The suspension creates a vertical movement, telling us in one direction what has been taken, and in the other what has fallen from the sky. In response to imperialist pressures that tend to weaken the soil, Feda Wardak’s work focuses on various mechanisms for preserving Afghanistan’s social, spatial and cultural identity.