The landscape of Sebkhet Sejoumi has changed drastically in recent decades. Once characterized by vast agricultural fields and sparse urban areas, it now faces challenges of urban expansion and embankments, resulting in the shrinking of its water body. Furthermore, the wetland is heavily polluted by runoff and domestic and industrial wastewater from a watershed that is affected by urbanization and the disorderly establishment of polluting industries.

When we walk in Sejoumi Lake, we step into the salicornia field and acknowledge its presence as a succulent being that reduces pollution and increases water flow. We listen to the voices of Sejoumi’s guardians, who, like resilient plants, face changing weather and the hardship of political conditions, while staying united, never give up dreaming of possible futures for Sejoumi. The disappearance of habitats is often seen as irreparable damage for which no one is held accountable. Weaving together the principles of restorative justice, we seek a new way of common living that recognizes water as an essential element of our lives. We seek reconciliation between victims and perpetrators — but in the case of ecocide, with NCL, we humbly try to acknowledge that we are entangled in complex diffuse relationships that make us both perpetrators and victims. Only when we're able to reconcile our relationship with the sacredness of the waters that live around us can we reconcile our relationship with the living.

As part of our process, we activate sensory exercises to raise awareness, creating context-specific gatherings, and water mourning circles where we open a space to share stories, memories of water, and personal narratives of solidarity towards other bodies of water that people have lost. We also share love letters to the waters, fabulations of what Sejoumi superheroes would be, and tools that project new forms of governance and care that would allow one to become a future Sejoumi guardian. These creative exchanges make it possible to live in a contested world, as one seeks shelter in the imagination, and the shimmering power of doing so collectively allows for new memories to arise together.

Walking and contemplating the Sebkhet Sejoumi, one can listen to the waste flying with the wind and nesting in the trees, while observing pink flamingos eating fish contaminated with microplastics. Inspired by the intricacy of ecological relationships, eco-scenography is concerned with interrelationships – between water and humans and other-than-humans – but also with the light, sounds, mud, and the materiality of ecosystems. Thinking with wetlands as spaces of intervention means integrating an awareness that the artistic choices concerning dramaturgy, script writing, rituals, and gatherings are intertwined with people and the surrounding ecosystem.

We incorporated principles of ecology to create upcycling, circular, and restorative actions with the Sejoumi, acknowledging that materiality and environments are interdependent. In the 2023 edition of the Dream City Festival, we collaborated with Aziz Romdhani, Nabil Aissaoui and other community members to design an eco-scenography for Agora Performance, which involved re-evaluating traditional construction techniques. This led to the adoption of a method of brick-building, that revolves around compressing mud from the area to create soil bricks. These bricks were used in the three-day performance and carried to different sites around the lake in a circular approach, endorsing how NCL uses an eco-scenography that activates spatial elements which dissolve over time to be re-integrated into the landscape. We opted to leave small traces of our gatherings rather than waste, as we wanted to start a dialogue with our surroundings and germinate new relationships and connections with the Sejoumi ecosystem and its inhabitants.

The first location of the performance was in the forest of Ibn Sina, where we held a space for listening, mobilizing, and dreaming with the voices of the people and guardians of the Sejoumi. After the event, we left a circle of soil-made benches in the forest as a lasting memory of the gathering. These benches may still be used by lake visitors who wish to rest and gather and have been activated several times over the months.

For the second location of the performance, we carried seven of these bricks to an olive grove by the lake, which is an example of farmers' resistance to local government policies. There, we held discussions on grief and forms of collective care with a small group of local activists. Encircling this space with bricks to hold the energetic circle of healing became a gesture of solidarity, while we attempted to create an alliance of rhizomatic care.

On the third day of the performance, we moved to the lake marshes, where pink flamingos bathe in the water next to the bird observatory of the association “Les Amis des Oiseaux”. At the home of the pink flamingos, we invited the Sejoumi Alliance* to join us in commemorating the changing ecosystems. Here, they walked in procession with all the soil bricks, setting an intention to rebuild the local bird observatory that was been destroyed in 2023. On that evening, we performed a celebratory ritual of collective building, expressing our wishes for the protection and restoration of Sejoumi in an evening accompanied by food and chants of resilience.

What collective practices do we need to design in order to have more reciprocate relationships of care towards bodies of water?

For the past four years, Natural Contract Lab has been walking-with, floating, and becoming the waters we collaborate with. Together, we research and learn from the water and its people, weaving our transdisciplinary practice to imagine an active and sustained dialogue with bodies of water undergoing deep ecological transformation. Our artistic interventions are hybrid, unfolding differently across each body of water as a dialogue and gesture of care with and through connected communities. To imagine new forms of justice, we have co-created an artistic Protocol of Reciprocal Care that combines practices of restorative justice, rights of nature, environmental grief, eco-scenography, and sensory scores. NCL is a collective body of care that invites others into moments of walking-with the river, mourning water circles, Agoras, Guardians of the River Schools, and other actions that emerge in collaboration with the fish, people, plants, and many other watery beings.