WRITING

Iman Zaoin refuses contemporary urgency in order to inhabit the instant fully, until the visible reveals its hidden layers. Exodus, forgetting, economic change: her work unfolds slowly and attentively, with an ethics of proximity that refuses voyeurism.

Things take time to reveal themselves. Time for trust to settle between two gazes, for the invisible to finally agree to show itself. In a world that devours its images as fast as it produces them, Iman Zaoin cultivates this patience. She photographs against the frenzy that turns the real into visual merchandise.

Iman Zaoin maps “this silent transformation, this fragile moment when the old world wavers before the new one has been defined”

Born in 1996 in Assisi, Italy, to a Moroccan mother and an Italian father, Iman was confronted early on with languages, landscapes and regimes of attention that were sometimes contradictory. This experience of being geographically torn sharpened a particular awareness of liminal spaces; she learned to turn dissonance into a resource. When she photographs Oulad Fraj, her mother’s native village, she captures a territory in metamorphosis, worked over by the rural exodus that is silently reshaping the Moroccan countryside. “I discovered a place suspended between memory and erasure there,” she explains. That suspension becomes the real object of her inquiry.

This work of visual investigation is also rooted in a wider intellectual path. During her studies in intercultural mediation, Iman Zaoin turned to contemporary Arab societies, wanting to better understand her origins and the social dynamics running through them. This research, both personal and analytical, now feeds her photographic practice. Rather than reviving fossilised memories, she maps “this silent transformation, this fragile moment when the old world wavers before the new one has been defined.” What is at stake is an archaeology of the present, an exploration of grey zones, of spaces where History comes undone and is remade at the same time.

The fundamental ethical question then arises: how do you make the irreducible visible when the image is, by essence, reductive? Against the visual extractivism that turns humanity into a deposit of spectacular images, Zaoin forges a radical decentring. Where others still cultivate the obsession with the decisive moment, she makes the opposite wager: time as raw material. This stance opens a horizontality that challenges the implicit hierarchies of the image. It requires giving up the overhead view, keeping at a distance the power of capture the camera confers. To take such a position is to share time, to establish a relation of listening and availability; this assumed slowness runs against the contemporary urgency of the immediate.

Time as raw material

In response to a present saturated with chaos and acceleration, Iman Zaoin shapes zones of calm where the agitation of the visible is suspended. “I’m drawn to simple moments, small details. There’s a lot of stillness in my images, very little action,” she says. This search for visual peace is not a retreat but a way of making sense, of resisting confusion by cultivating sustained attention to the faint forms of the real. It is this extended temporality that allows her to do justice to the complexity of the people she photographs. In the work she has been doing in the Ketama region in particular, this ethics of looking takes on a political dimension. Far from the sensationalist images attached to cannabis growers, Zaoin sets out to “make visible struggles and lives that are often reduced to miserabilism or criminalisation.”

This is perhaps the most precious legacy of a childhood spent between the north and the south of the Mediterranean: a sensibility born of friction rather than a wound. Her relation to displacement refines her gaze and turns it towards what resists immediate capture. To bear witness to these margins, these silences, these stories, one must first unlearn urgency and cultivate the fertile slowness in which alone a real encounter can happen.