moulay bouchta khammar - al wahda
Jnan l’Manzel is a long-term project created with my mother near Al Wehda Dam, between the lake and the mountains of northern Morocco.
It is both a home and a living ecosystem, a space for regeneration, listening, and coexistence.
The project brings together architecture, ecology, and art through the slow construction of an autonomous house built from local earth, stone, and reclaimed materials. Around it, we are replanting native trees with the miyawaki method to rebuild a forest and cultivating a permaculture garden to restore the balance of the soil and the surrounding landscape.
Rooted in our family’s origins in this region, Jnan l’Manzel will not only be a place to live, but a gesture of repair, an attempt to reconnect with ancestral knowledge and the cycles of water, wind, and light. It is an evolving laboratory for sustainable living and collective memory, shaped by care, time, and the hope that the lake will fill again.
In the long term, Jnan l’Manzel will become an artistic residency, inviting artists, researchers, and farmers to share time, skills, and experiences. The project seeks to create new forms of dialogue between art, ecology, and rural life — to help revive the countryside through collective gestures of learning, exchange, and care.
In October 2025, we planted 500 trees with a diverse team of artists, activists, students, and photographers, marking a collective step towards rewilding the land and nurturing the future of the project.