Inhabiting the desert: Boucraa, an invisible town

Our project explores the traces left by mining activity in Boucraa, a town in the Sahara 100km south-west of Laâyoune, and proposes to transform and revitalise them in order to create conditions necessary for living, in a salvational process of re-naturalising the ground which has been exploited. The landscape is inhabited by a drapery of folds, faults and hollows, the results of crude ore extraction from the soil, and currently naturalised by the artificial hills and furrows of overturned earth which are the marks of mining activity.  This project shapes the relief and topography so as to give substance to spaces which were previously impossible or unthinkable, spaces open to the sky, the sun and the moon, buried in the earth as a starry network, like a textured interweaving of masses and voids which will constitute the imaginary aspect of an invisible town.