Adelita Husni Bey & Sara Alberani
The Ecologies of the Submerged – screening and talk
On September 10, Adelita Husni Bey and Sara Alberani, in collaboration with LOCALES, were invited into CLASSE — a project of transmission, compromise, blending and mixing, invented pedagogies and radical imagination, moving through the Short Theatre 2026’s programme and beyond.
The Ecologies of the Submerged class began with a screening 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 work was presented as a national premiere at Short Theatre 2026. The screening was followed by a conversation between artist Adelita Husni Bey and curator Sara Alberani, exploring the submerged as a material, ecological and political condition.
Like a Flood is an audiovisual work by Adelita Husni Bey that, drawing on a recently rediscovered and reinterpreted photographic archive, investigates the consequences of the disruption of water supply in Libya — tracing the connections between the exploitation of water resources and the forced settlement policies enacted during the Italian colonial period (1911–1943).
The conversation between Alberani and Husni Bey addressed the legacy of colonialism and the power relations that continue to structure the present, opening a reflection on the concept of adaptability, on water infrastructures in relation to extractive ones, and on how the submerged can speak of what remains invisible or is deliberately hidden, removed — but also of what persists in potency, refusing to be extracted.
