Moroccan-Cypriot Label ITER MORA Explores Amazigh Futurism

“My childhood bedroom was aligned to the Orion constellation, and every time I looked up at the sky I thought about my ancestors thousands of years ago and how they had this huge connection to the stars. Why were they so connected to it? What did it guide them to? Did it ascend them?” Elias ruminates.

Born in the UK to Moroccan and Greek Cypriot parents, Elias Riadi grew up fascinated with what the stars could reveal about both origin and destiny. You can see traces of his love of space in his work in fashion and creative direction first coming into view as a founding member of cult fashion web series PAQ.

When the world stopped in 2020 and the future didn’t feel viable, Riad suddenly had nowhere to go but inward. The enforced stillness became a kind of lockdown in orbit – a chance to turn his gaze back through himself, towards his Amazigh roots.
That inward turn kept circling back to the sky. Galaxies are a vital source of what we know about the history of the universe – from the Big Bang to the formation of the planets, and the very elements that make up life. Yet, there’s something disquieting about having to look at the stars to understand the past. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson warns of a future where dark energy stretches the universe so far that distant galaxies slip beyond what we can see. In that future, cosmic explorers will only have the Milky Way to study, decoding history “as if an entire chapter of the universe was ripped from their view.”

On Earth, some chapters are already missing. For Amazigh people, an indigenous people of North Africa with very little formal archives, so much of their past exists in fragments and footnotes, that it too can feel as if a whole section of their history has been torn out of a book. In search of this past, Riadi drifted into the retro sci-fi world he already knew by heart. With his label ITER MORA, he uses the lens of Amazigh futurism to explore the gaps in his own heritage – threading ancestral codes into speculative futures.There’s already a language for this kind of time travel. Afro-Futurism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy, and way of life that’s been orbiting Black imagination for decades. From the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra in the 1940s to the speculative worlds of sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, it’s about reclaiming and reimagining both the past and the futures of Black history. It steps into the sci-fi spaces and fantasy worlds where Black people have long been erased – universes with aliens, dragons, and impossible technology but no Black faces – and refuses that absence. Instead, it insists that Black histories, bodies, and visions not only exist in the future, but help shape it.

The canon of Western sci-fi Riadi grew up watching is full of North African backdrops and Islamic world references disguised as “elsewhere.” The result was a strange double feeling for Riadi: recognition and erasure at once. On screen, the futures were supposedly alien, yet the landscapes were not. You see the burnt-orange desert of Dune and the Fremen in flowing veils, their bodies coded as “other” for Western audiences – but for Riadi, they echo Tuareg and Amazigh silhouettes: indigo-dyed robes, faces stained blue where the dye has bled into skin.

Step outside those frames and into the way history is told, and the pattern repeats. Ancient Amazigh, Egyptian and broader North African knowledge systems are still routinely dismissed as impossible without “alien” intervention. “Westerners are still trying to understand how societies back then were so ahead of their time,” he says. “And they’re like, ‘it must have been built by aliens.’ Actually, no – our ancestors probably had a lot of wisdom and knowledge, even ancient technology that we can’t fathom today.” Closer to home, he adds, erasure was happening locally too, as post-independence Arabization policies in Morocco suppressed Amazigh culture so deeply that parents were not even allowed to give their children Amazigh names until 2014.
For Riadi, ITER MORA began where the archive seemed to end – picking up the torn-out chapter and going looking for it in the stars. “I had to piece this history together, almost like piecing together myself,” he says. That research spiralled outward: myths, cave art, desert cosmologies, Amazigh pharaohs in Egyptian dynasties, talismans calibrated to constellations. He became obsessed with the way his ancestors read the sky long before GPS and planetariums, how pyramids and temples were aligned with Orion’s belt or the Southern Cross. Online, he found Yasir, the mind behind the Instagram account @yass_mythos (Amazigh Mythology), who reads indigenous Amazign texts and translates them into accessible posts about gods, spirits, rituals. “He breaks down myths and traditions I never had access to, especially because they’re not published in English,” Riadi explains. So many stories and languages are slipping out of the archive, disappearing without the infrastructure to hold them. “We don’t really have a museum that is made by us, really cultivated about us and protecting us,” Riadi says. “You need to know where you come from to know where you need to go.”

The name of his label, ITER MORA, folds that idea into a single word – building a space where the past and the future exist in one present. The first capsule collection, Au Sahara 2970, is anchored in the Sahara, where his great-grandmother comes from Tata, on the edge of the desert. He thinks about nomads as if they’re already half sci-fi: bodies moving across landscapes, guided by stars, never fully rooted in one place. “I love the idea of them taking that to the future,” he shares.

When it comes to the history of Amazigh clothes, it needed to be suitable for these long journeys and harsh environments of the desert. Inspired by this he takes traditional Amazigh garments and reimagines them with tech fabrics and sci-fi silhouettes – veils become futuristic hoods, and face-framing knits made from laser-cut fabrics. In each piece, he tries to encode protection, resistance, and the strength and beauty of his people into a forward-facing uniform.The urge to write a missing chapter spilled from designing into directing a short film. His directorial debut, The City of Orion, a fifteen–minute folktale set in Morocco that feels both ancient and slightly out of time. It began when Riadi stumbled on a series of seven mud towers in the Moroccan desert, an earth-built observatory by artist Hans Voth, aligned precisely with the constellation of Orion. The structures looked like they’d been raised by ancestors and dropped into a future timeline: raw earth, brutal geometry, and a celestial blueprint tying the desert floor to the stars. He knew instantly this was the portal he’d been searching for.

From there, he started weaving in Amazigh myth. While researching, he found the Guedra – a southern Amazigh folkloric dance practised in parts of Morocco and Mauritania, a ritual that sends energy to the past, present, future, sun, and stars. In The The City of Orion, an Amazigh troupe crosses the desert in search of a lost stargate. At its threshold stands the Guedra, both gatekeeper and guide, reimagined as a powerful woman guarding the passage between worlds. When she finally lets them in, the film turns into a ritual of shedding: dancers confronting their shadow selves, moving through trance and repetition until they ascend into the stars.

Every element of the film is built to hold those myths. The costumes take Amazigh silhouettes – veils, hoods, talismanic jewellery – and reroute them through ITER MORA’s language of futurist armour. Movement pulls from the real Guedra: circling, stamping, a slow build into trance, bodies becoming a kind of antenna. Even casting felt guided, Elias found Malika, the woman who plays the Guedra, on the cover of a Moroccan album he’d been listening to on repeat; she turned out to be from the same region as his great-grandmother and had recently studied the Guedra dance in person. “The alignment was so special,” he says, as if the story chose its own vessels.Shooting it meant taking that cosmic interior world back to the source. Riadi assembled a predominantly Moroccan crew and cast, then brought over a handful of close collaborators from London. They drove out into the desert for a five-day window, with just twelve hours to capture the film itself. The day began not with a slate, but a circle: cast and crew standing together blessing the shoot with a prayer. “That unity is such a powerful thing. It's something that I had never experienced working on shoots in the West.” Elias reflects.
From there it became a race against the sun: choreography rehearsed in dust, costumes being fitted on-site, the last shot caught just as darkness dropped over the towers. Exhausting, yes, but to Riadi “it felt like something was being channeled through him” rather than simply directed by him.

If the towers and bodies are one half of The City of Orion, the score is the other. Riadi worked with his friend Joel Compass, a London-based composer and producer, on an original soundtrack over nearly two years. He wanted the sound to act as its own character: a pulse that moves the viewer from apprehension to resistance, then into release and eventual transcendence. With help from Yassir of the “Amazigh Mythology” project, they tracked down a tribal group in the Tinghir region who sang a traditional song about following a guiding star. The singers were brought to a tiny local studio in Morocco; Riadi and Joel, back in London, directed the session over WhatsApp, asking for certain words in Tamazight, certain inflections, certain breaths. Those recordings were folded into strings and synths.

Riadi has lived this film for years – through pre-production spreadsheets, a 12-hour desert shoot, and the long, grinding patience of indie VFX and editing. Having recently premiered at the Rabat International Film Festival, it felt like closing a loop for Riadi, in the country whose myths and sky shaped it.Next, Riadi is less interested in racing through fashion seasons than deepening the world he’s building. He’s heading to Fez to work closely with Moroccan leather artisans, while quietly developing eyewear – one of his first loves – and accessories. For now, he’s still laying foundations and finding the right collaborators, letting the structure of ITER MORA emerge on its own terms.

In Tyson’s imagined future, whole galaxies slip beyond view, leaving the next generation to reconstruct the universe from whatever stars are left. ITER MORA lives in a similar space of almost-loss: a designer sifting through scattered myths, sci-fi echoes, family memories and half-translated texts, trying to write a chapter back into existence. For Riadi, Amazigh futurism is an act of stitching yourself into the cosmos so no one can say, later, that you were never there.