Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni, in collaboration with composer/percussionist Sushi Ibarra, has designed a musical installation for the Medina of Fez in Morocco, titled Musical Water Routes.

“Musical Water Routes of the Medina of Fes honors the history of rivers and water routes in the Medina, the sacredness of water and its use, while expressing it in a palette to invite an urban community today to interact and reflect upon the future of the Medina’s water heritage,” writes Chaouni and Ibarra.

The project proposes a walking meditation and musical experience that invites the public to interact with and contemplate the visible and invisible manifestations of water in the Medina of Fez. The audience will stop at 3 sites along the Medina: the Noria square, Souk El Henna, and the Seffarine square. There, they will be introduced to the historic architecture of the site, and they will listen the to live music compositions created for each space. Reminiscent of the water that stills runs or once was in the 3 sites, Ibarra’s music is composed from a myriad of local percussion sounds created with metal, brass, bronze, wood, skins and glass.

Musical Water Routes was created for the 2016 Fez Sacred Music Festival, a 10-day-long celebration held in mid-summer that showcases major musical traditions of sacred, spiritual, and world music. In 2014, Chaouni created a project for the Festival titled Simorgh Stage Set. The artwork, a magical bird, was created by dancers each carrying a panel covered with origami feathers made out of recycled newspapers.