In the summer of 2023, nine years after my first visit, I returned for the fourth time to Hassie Labied, in Morocco’s Tafilalet region, to try and complete a documentary film project I had been forced to abandon due to the Covid lockdowns. As it became clear in my mind that the film I wanted to make was no longer possible, I loaded a 24-frame roll into my Kiev 4M and tried to immerse myself - and almost dissolve - into that world.

I didn’t follow a concept: I let the landscape, the light, the surfaces and presences decide for me. From that roll, 13 frames emerged: the fragments I chose to keep.

24 gestures to disappear is neither a linear story nor a reportage. These images are minimal photographic gestures - attempts to escape the urgency to see and to describe, a form of resistance to the extractive frenzy of capitalism, which turns gazes and territories into commodities.

Each frame is the trace of a passage, a fragile memory, light on film. Distances stretch out, details dissolve into the thick, sand-filled air. The very act of photographing - analog, limited, slow - becomes a way of letting oneself fade into the margins of the scene.

24 is a technical reference to the number of exposures on a roll of film.
24 is also a measure of limitation, of silence, of resistance to over-presence.

In an era where everything pushes toward visibility, I chose to listen to what lingers at the edges. I chose to use an image that does not shout, but endures.