This series, produced around Casablanca( Morocco) outskirts, explores the way old boundaries existing between the rural world and an ever-growing urban world seem to be fading away. A deep transition is taking place. A kind of collision none expected.
It simply looks like the urban world is annexing small parts of the rural areas without any sort of urban planning, most of this process occurs in a violent silence.
The main feeling is that this is not a relationship of consent, but rather a certain violence in this accelerating process. Being from Morocco, and having lived in Europe for a decade, I have the feeling that the whole countryside is being under construction. The rural world and the urban one are frontally colliding. Moreover, I feel that there is a tremendous lack of planning, which is already starting to produce weird landscapes, in which we clearly see that each part is trying to survive on its own. Real-Estate companies take advantage on anti-speculation laws that put farmers under pressure; either they reach a certain quantity of production or they are forced to sell their lands quickly at low prices.
This urban phenomenon brings a whole series of social and ecological issues that we are starting to be aware of. Farmers are forced to live in the new city outskirts in precarious ways; people that cannot afford living in the city center are also forced to exile themselves in this very same outskirts as former farmers, creating new neighbours of “ exiled “ people that end up being city-ghettos. The phenomenon is so fast, that it seems that the city was built with it's ghettos from the beginning.
The technique employed is Infrared Photography. For the main reason that Moroccan are getting used to these brand-new landscapes. I wanted to put emphasis on certain scenes, using infrared strange chroma, to point out at what's happening. Which creates a wide range of chromatic weird contrast, breaking down with the apparent normality surrounding the outskirts of the city.