Tangier / Something is Possible

Two photographers, one city. Mounir Fatmi and Guillaume de Sardes lived and photographed Tangier. Their different perspectives do not claim to capture the city — could that even be done? —, but rather to reproduce the sense of a city. The approach is subjective, sensitive to the passage of time, balancing documentary and fiction.

Mounir Fatmi:
Brimming with details, the photographs in this series capture the atmosphere of a constantly changing city where bodies literally blend into the background. In this sense, they are weighed down by a sociological weight, but they are just as much about intimate and memorial exploration.

Guillaume de Sardes:
By mixing image and text, Guillaume de Sardes also questions the relationship between photography and literature: “Images fix my memories, writing clarifies them. For me, photography is above all the means of retaining a moment and literature is to give it meaning.” In doing so, he places his work in line with that of another traveller who lingered in Tangier more than sixty years ago: the poet and photographer Allen Ginsberg.