Morocco
The first time I look into the night sky of Morocco, I find clarity in the unknown. Morocco greets me with a large half moon surrounded by clouds. Everything I recognize in Marrakech is shadowy and deceptive. The city looks as if it is covered by a thin layer of snow. The whirled up dust under my feet is played around by shadows scurrying through narrow streets. Lost and numbed I stumble through the Orient and am torn from Europe on a roller coaster ride of impressions. Past all the jugglers, those with unsteady, dark eyes in gaunt faces, tugging and courting for attention.
In a small garden above the city, trying to feel, to fathom what the red city does to me. The walls seem boundless, yet framing and restricting. Everywhere stories, mysteries, occult tales are waiting to be whispered into the night wind. Time seems to play no role. Time doesn't seem to pass either, but shuffles by lazily and unobserved. What does the ordinary life count? What alleged security? If I am nothing, I can do anything.
Marrakech is at its most beautiful when you stand above it, on roof terraces looking out into the vastness of the medina with peace, the distance necessary to feel the mystery. Silence, me and the foreign, only threatened by dark thoughts pondering into the distance on provisional, unplastered cascades of houses - beautiful thanks to the lack of details in the play of light and shadow - staring I linger in myself and with myself, waiting for myself.
I experience the land filtered through the art of photography. Photography is the medium that shapes my experiences and changes my reality. Photography makes me suffer and love, is happiness, longing, temptation and waste.
I wait for the low sun, the nocturnal Marrakech. Insanity, chaos, total overstimulation, danger and security in constant change, ambivalent feelings. As if the world around me is exploding, shifting laws of nature. What a crazy ride. Sublime hands, whose beauty is marked by years of renunciation and depth in handicraft, hand me tea out while the sky above me turns into a reddish discolouration and hot wind kicks up dust, opposes the calm and ends booming in a sandstorm whose heat and intensity numbs me.
At the speed of light I race in slow motion through breathtaking expanses, accompanied by Tuareg music. Incredible food in a pearl in the middle of nowhere, accompanied by unknown blues music. Morocco shows its most beautiful side and proves diversity and multiplicity, while the air in the Atlas Mountains intoxicates me.
“No more sleepwalking. Keep me with you go.”
— Nànnuflày by Tinariwen
The voice of Mark Langen singing to the music of the Tuarec in the endless expanses of the Sahara. This addictive emptiness. Where can it be emptier, even further? Just my camera, a lens and me. I search for the vastness, the nothingness, the mountains, the valleys, the undreamed dreams, the remote paths, the unexpressed dull feelings that do not manage to express themselves and my heart is seized by existence. The moment of overwhelming, everything here concentrated in a moment of beauty and sublimity - without judgement - without interpretation.
