Feda Wardak

Born in 1991 in Peshawar, Pakistan, Franco-Afghan architect and artist Feda Wardak examines the effects of extractivism and imperialist legacies on inhabited environments. Since 2012, he has explored the effects of armed conflict on traditional water management systems in rural areas such as Jaghatu, eastern Afghanistan. Devastated by decades of war—from the Soviet invasion between 1979 and 1989 to the NATO and US interventions after 2001, and the return of the Taliban in 2021—the hydraulic infrastructure and transmission of irrigation-related knowledge have been profoundly affected.

In these territories where water governs both planting times and social organization, Feda Wardak has given himself the objective of collectively repairing karez, millennia-old underground irrigation networks damaged by American drone strikes. This commitment is also expressed through his artworks, like the Chercheurs d’eau [Water Seekers] series begun in 2024. In the face of American aerial surveillance and the vestiges of 20th-century violence, Feda Wardak’s work bears witness to a different temporality, that of the underground where a form of peasant resistance is organized, repairing these waterways.

Like Ibrahim Mahama, whom he met at the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2023) and the Lagos Art Biennial (2024), Feda Wardak sees architecture as a tool that is political and collective alike, using visual, choreographic, cinematic, and sound forms to engage in repair, preservation, and the duty of remembrance.