Oasis Festival · Moroccan Square

My team and I designed and managed the festival's food experience. At a festival, food is not a service at the edge of the programme. People spend hours on site, and what they eat, where and how they queue shape their memory of the day as much as the line-up does.

So the brief was an experience to design, not a catering contract to fill: what is offered, where it sits on the site, how people move to it and through it, and what it says about the place they are in. Food also decides who a festival is for. An offer priced and styled for one audience quietly tells everyone else they are visitors.

My team and I created the Moroccan Square. A square is a public form: you cross it, stop in it, eat, meet people. Naming it Moroccan made a claim inside a festival held in Morocco: the host country would be present as itself, at the centre of the site, and not only as scenery behind the stages.

That is the same question I worked on with Marrakech artisans in those years for UNIDO: how a local culture shows up in front of an international audience without turning into decoration.

The mandate did not end at the concept. My team and I designed the experience and then managed it, across the period recorded from 2016 to 2021. Operating what you designed is where a concept meets queues, supply, weather and crowds, and where you learn which ideas survive.

Management is where a design is tested hour by hour: what runs out, where people bunch, what the square looks like when it is full and when it is empty. Running it yourself is how those observations reach the next design instead of disappearing into someone else's report.

That habit of staying close enough to implementation to see whether the plan holds runs through the rest of my work, from institutional programmes to brand systems.

The collaboration began a year after I founded La Cuisine de Mami Bahia, a food brand, and rested on the same conviction: food carries identity as clearly as any logo.