Morocco, the Atlantic coast between Essaouira and Safi, a world that will not be filtered. It happens. It hits you before you can decide how to look at it. The heat, the noise, the density of bodies that inhabit every space without hesitation, and then the light, a light that softens nothing, that exposes, cuts, reveals. There is no safe distance here. What happens does not wait to be understood, does not pose, grants no time.
From inside the taxis that cross the coast. This is how I move, from one point to another, across distances that offer themselves to no human step. Yet it is out of this necessity that something takes form. Through dirty glass, opaque with dust and light, the landscape begins to come apart and recompose in a sequence that escapes control. They are apparitions, fragments that surface and dissolve in the same gesture, faces that have no time to become identities, landscapes that exist only for the length of an instant. The glass distorts, speed subtracts, there is no way back, what remains is all that was granted, unstable, imperfect, on the edge of disappearing. It is a grammar dictated by movement, where the error is not a deviation but a necessary form of truth.
Then the body steps down, walks, and on foot the space reorganizes itself. Time dilates, grows dense, resistant, and here images are not taken, they are built inside a relation. Every encounter implies a position, even when it goes undeclared. The gaze is never neutral, you draw near, you expose yourself, and every step is a request. To be there is to take part, even when all you would want is to observe, you are present, more than an observer.
In the middle of all this, the territory, the Atlantic coast, vast, crossed by a light that splits the stone and a wind that does not stop. Places that hold a measure of their own, that impose slowness, the weight of the landscape, its indifference, its beauty that asks for nothing. Within this space, what surfaces most clearly is a humanity that does not retreat. Bodies occupy, insist, declare their own presence without mediation, there is no distance between existing and showing oneself. It is not a matter of local color, nor of nostalgia. It is something more essential and harder to name, a way of being in the world that has not yet given up its physical dimension, immediate, irreducible. A way of being that does not shield itself behind representations, it exposes itself.
Da Ovest a Ovest is not only the name of this crossing, it is an ambiguous direction, almost circular, a movement that leads nowhere else but carries you back, again and again, inside the experience itself. I photographed what I saw, from the glass and on the street, with no clear idea of what I was looking for, and I have even less of one now. What I find again in these images is something I recognize, beyond memory.
