Siwa Drawings
In November 1984, in my room in a simple fonduk in the Siwa Oasis, when there were no cell phones or internet, at night I would sketch the scenes I had photographed during the day. It was a way to remember what I was doing, as I would not be able to see the negatives until a few months later, when I developed the black and white Tri-X film negatives in the bathroom of a friend, the Armenian artist Chant Avedissian. The drawings, done with colored pencils and India ink, were the memory of my work, and every night, after smoking a nicely loaded shisha, I would draw what I thought I had photographed during the day.
Over the years, I forgot about those drawings and, when I moved to the countryside, I found a box with the notebooks that I thought lost. Later I came to think that those images were a kind of incantation. Just as primitive men who had drawn on the walls of their caves bison and other animals they planned to hunt, I would depict on paper during those nights of hashish and opium the scenes I wanted to capture.
Those drawings did not always correspond to my photographs. Sometimes I would draw made-up scenes that I would have liked to photograph. What’s curious is that many years later, on the island of Socotra, I took photographs of characters that seemed to be traced from those drawings. Whether they were from Siwa or prophetic of other places, here they are. “My Siwa Drawings.”
Published by Àfriques Edicions