Following several years of collaboration between LOCALES and Adelita Husni Bey, initiated in 2022 with the workshop A Collection in Turmoil at the Museo delle Civiltà di Roma, this ongoing inquiry entered a new phase. From 10 to 12 September 2026, LOCALES, in collaboration with Short Theatre 2026 — a multidisciplinary festival dedicated to contemporary performing arts based in Rome — presented a new workshop with Adelita Husni Bey and Sara Alberani, Insurgent Waters. Infrastructures and Practices of Insertion.

Conceived as an extension of Like a Flood — Husni Bey’s expanded cinema installation presented at the 2025 Sharjah Biennial, which examines the entanglement of Italian colonial history, water infrastructures, techno-fetishism, and climate devastation within the framework of extractive capitalism in Libya — the new workshop brings together Sara Alberani’s work on water as an “insurgent body” and Husni Bey’s investigation of water infrastructures across modernity, toxicity, and colonial expansion.

Drawing on the methodologies of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, participants took part in collective exercises, discussions, and practices of embodied analysis. The workshop unfolds through the methodology of “grafting”, in which each participant brought a case study to develop a “graft” within their own territory, understood as a tool of materialist analysis. Particular attention was given to Rome’s water infrastructures and the industrial development of the Ostiense district, the river port, and the stretch of the Tiber leading to Teatro India, explored through archival materials and site visits led by the artistic collective DOM — Leonardo Delogu and Valerio Sirna.

In dialogue with the screening of Like a Flood at Short Theatre on 10 September and the CLASSE talk The Ecologies of the Submerged, the workshop opens a space for reflecting on water through Marina Vishmidt’s notion of infrastructural critique, with a focus on its extractive and insurgent dimensions.