A Gendered Counter-archive: Mining and Resistance in Morocco

Abstract

In August 2011, thousands of villagers climbed Mount Alebban in Imider, southeast Morocco. They shut off the valve diverting water from the mountain's reservoir to a neighbouring silver mine. The villagers’ encampment on the mount lasted for eight years, withstanding state violence, prison sentences and political containment. Although Imider was considered a political protest camp, this article explores it through the notion of counter-archive, defining the counter-archive as a collective record keeping of disruption. The Imider camp is a counter-archive in the sense that it enabled unauthorized stories to surface and radical politics to emerge. As a counter-archive, it revealed the hidden links between politics and profit, extraction and dispossession, and life and death. As a forbidden space, the camp engaged in a quotidian performance of collective modes of living that resisted erasure through artwork, gendered spatial arrangements, storytelling and record making. The goal of the article is twofold: to illustrate the everyday making of this counter-archive by analysing the modes of disruptive engagement of the villagers with the mine, and the new communities they have generated; and to show the soft spots of radical politics and its vulnerability in the context of neoliberal governance.