The earthquake in the Moroccan Atlas on September 8, 2023 killed almost 3,000 people and left an indelible mark on North Africa, an area already cracked by history.

“When everyone leaves” is not a photojournalistic work. These are photos taken by the protagonists of the disaster, who posed in front of the rubble, drawing and writing how they imagine rebuilding their homes, on portraits made with a Polaroid. Seeing oneself portrayed, having a printed photograph, and intervening in it by drawing as They imagine rebuilding their lives and their homes, in an act in itself of vindication and hope towards a people to whom we have all turned our gaze. When everyone has left and silence arrives, the duel begins, and through a portrait and always accompanied by a generous cup of tea, they have the opportunity to look at each other and be looked at as an excuse to listen, to "imagine" themselves in a future that does not leave them aside.

The douares, the small towns of ocher houses that are scattered throughout the mountains and that have changed their landscape, filling themselves with tents, taking the worst part of the catastrophe, they have always suffered from an incessant stream of tourists photographing their miseries for Instagram accounts, without stopping to ask about the misery and pain. A tourism from which they lived, turned into a tour of the poor houses and the poor people, where you can “take” a photo of some goats at the top of an olive tree in exchange for a few dihams, or fill your account with the colorful houses of chalk that paints the valleys. Poor houses too, made of adobe that turned into sandstone after the shock. Images of easy digestion, “extracted” for very cheap food consumption. This postcard safari hardly leaves anything in its wake, there is no dialogue, much less a reflection, and above all the person photographed is a mere figurative resource in the frame.