MIRLEFT, the village to the left of the sea *

« The brighter the light, the darker the darkness... It is impossible to properly appreciate the light without knowing the darkness."

Jean-Paul Sartre

In Southern Morocco, the village of Mirleft is a small picturesque seaside town. Its main street is lined with arcades housing hotels, grocery stores, and restaurants. But behind the picture postcard is an urban landscape, with concrete buildings, a brand new mosque and a lot of wasteland that creates a desolate image. The earth there is red, arid, and sterile leaving only rare cacti and a lot of waste.



The ashen lights and deserted streets are a favorite place for my shots at twilight. When the sun sets, the canvas transforms, and reveals spaces in the dance of artificial luminescence that sculpts the night. Then begins a journey through a silent, timeless, mysterious city where Mirleft looks like the end of the world.



David Lynch says “We don’t know what’s hidden in the dark,“ and what my camera lens is chasing. In my photographs, the urban landscapes of Mirleft are transformed into cinema sets from a Lynch movie, timeless, distorted, between dream and reality. My photos offer up poetic settings where my favorite themes of the mystical, the strange, the supernatural, memory and melancholy intersect.



Losing myself in the heart of this floating territory, I paint with the lights of the city, garish and scenographic, like outrageous make-up, thus rebuilding a fantasy landscape, where the absence of human presence emphasizes the ghostly aspect of the place. Mirleft is then revealed as a LEGO ® game whose blocks accumulate and collide. But capturing the light hanging from these buildings is actually capturing the brutal silence of the place, which seems to seek sleep in this acid night, gently lulled away by the sound of the waves.




* «the village to the left of the sea» is a translation suggested by Wikipedia of the name of Mirleft