In 2020, I was invited to a social workshop in the city of Seville, Spain. I shared my experience as a migrant during the workshop and met different people from all over the world: Latino guys like me, people from Eastern Europe and a group of young men, who migrated from Morocco. The project started without the intention of being a body of work. At the beginning I only took pictures that they used personally, to post on Instagram or to share with relatives. As the months went by, I realised what was happening with those pictures, and I decided to implement some rules to play by: a frequency, a type of approach, a certain time. This is how our encounter evolved into a project.

I see 'Dialect' as a method of resistance. It is a way of constructing reality in an ambiguous zone that challenges the official language. It has also been a question on my mind well before the project, which has to do with ways of displacing a whole, in this case, the imposition of a European project of borders, and from that place, uninhabitable at first, to build a space.

The effort, impossible at times, to approach the core of the project was the reason why I tried to ask myself the same question from different perspectives. I insist that every photographic effort is a failed attempt to approach reality. That is why in the case of Dialect, I approached it, clumsily, with the tools I had at the time. 

Food was part of our everyday conversations, how food itself constructs an identity and even another border. In the series, there are images of bread, fish, tomatoes: everyday items, with which they had to decide what to cook and how, in that sense, an identity was built around cooking. I was also inspired by Food, Refugees and Asylum seekers. Between (in)security and agency: ethnographic studies from European urban and rural settings and border areas by Caterina Borelli.

Fortunately for me, I found some courageous partners to take on this project (Lewis and Sarah). We worked together (from the sequence to the selection of essays) and everything was woven in that workflow, the book has been the materialisation of the fundamental issues of the project. All the decisions of the book were aimed at finding a bureaucratic approach, where the commitment to the image would be respected, but at the same time the political conditions that surround and are the cause of everything that happens in the project would be emphasized.  

Two of the guys in the photographs wrote texts that expand the spectrum of the work as a whole. One of them, Youssef, wrote about his story on the trip from Tangier. Zakaria wrote a fiction mixed with his own memoirs. 

Yes, as a migrant in Spain it is the document that categorizes me as a person and consequently it will stay with you as long as you do not have a European passport. This assumption is the starting point of the piece - This is your law - a tower of papers composed by the Spanish migration law printed up to excess (almost 24.000 pages). In that sense, this law has a strange condition: it is voted by people to whom it does not apply, and at the same time, it applies to those people who cannot decide about it.

Fortunately, everyone is working – on different projects. After the waiting time, they have got documentation (me too) and I am still working with some of them in different projects as a result of Dialect. I think it was an empowering experience for all of us.