Aish, 2009

Aish means life, but in Egypt it’s also the word for bread. Aish, life and bread were combined in my last trip through the country with the most mysterious and fascinating civilisation on earth: Egypt. Upon arrival, my first impression was I was facing something unlike anything I thought of or planned for. I then decided to detach myself from my camera lens, stop seeing with western eyes to avoid becoming the other alien and learned to walk slowly, avoiding the direct gaze. Read more

Aish is a series of photographs, a personal blog about a life I didn’t know lived within me where I keep fragments of feelings and emotions. It is the diary of an unexpected journey but also of a journey within myself where I can see myself through others: their gestures, expressions, landscapes.
In Aish you can spot the quiet Edfu, the bargaining in Ras Sudr, the fighting in Aswan and the screaming in Alexandria mixing perfectly together. But the unthinkable only happens in Cairo, entangled city with a hard to define scent, where flea infested dogs stroll through the market full of people in their comings and goings, where you can only mitigate the inclement heat under patches of shadows projected by almost unreal trees. That’s when I realise that wherever I look, there is life, there is Aish. At the end of the journey I can only say thanks and order a coffee in arabic, but the emotion of knowing everything I photographed contains Aish sets me within a new language I didn’t know, the language of life captured in an instant by my camera.

Aish (Life in Arabic and bread in Egypt). Aish was a solo exhibition in the FotoEspai Gallery in Gandia, Spain in 2009 and in the Egyptian Institute in Madrid, Spain. The photography organisation FotoEspai published a catalogue for the exhibition, with text in both Spanish and Arabic.