Through my evolving series Pause longue, I have been developing since 2022 a distinctive photographic language grounded in slowness, blur, and intuition. Created in Paris, Tétouan, Lisbon, and Tokyo, this series is not intended as a geographical atlas, but as a network of emotional landmarks, where each city becomes a pretext to question memory, distance, and my gaze toward the Other.

The formal principle, simple in appearance, is that of the handheld long exposure: images taken over 3, 8, or 15 seconds, without tripod or stabilisation, often with a camera, sometimes with a mobile phone. This deliberately fragile, almost improvised gesture is an act of self-empowerment. It allows me to break free from the constraints of classical technique, moving closer to a sensorial, intuitive, and embodied practice. The image is not constructed; it is captured in an in-between space — between appearance and disappearance — within the very duration of lived experience.

This aesthetic of blur, movement, and visual disorientation is never gratuitous: it reflects a troubled relationship with elsewhere, both desired and problematic. Each territory explored in Pause longue is at once familiar and distant. Tétouan, city of origins and absence; Paris, the urban matrix of childhood and solitude; Lisbon, a place of return after a rupture in time; Tokyo, a dreamed, distorted, and confronted metropolis. In every case, these are places inhabited by complex emotional memories, which the image seeks to bring forth without fixing.

The series works on the shifting ground between perception and projection, between intimate experience and shared cultural codes. My photographs question how we construct our imaginaries of the Other: What do we expect from elsewhere? What do we project onto it? And what do we betray in believing we represent it? Through my deliberate use of saturated colour, doubling, or misted monochrome, I both reveal and question the latent exoticism in the contemporary artistic gaze — whether fantasised, critical, or claimed.

But Pause longue is also a process of reclaiming identity. Each chapter marks a return to places shaped by rupture — geographical, romantic, creative — in order to rebuild a sense of unity. The long exposure becomes a rite of resilience, a way of redeploying my presence in a fragmented world where belonging is always in tension. It is as much about inhabiting the city as losing myself in it to better find my way back.

By immersing myself in these plural territories, I also question the transmission of cultural narratives. My work reveals a contemporary folklore, at once inherited, reinterpreted, and sometimes instrumentalised: whether in the visual motifs of Tokyo, in the fragments of collected voices in Tétouan, or in the ambiguity of Parisian signs, I propose a re-reading of reality through the filter of a fragmented yet lucid sensibility. I do not document; I composite, recompose, and alter in order to tell more truthfully.

Pause longue is not merely a series: it is an intimate and critical cartography. An attempt to walk, to look, to trace the folds of memory, the mirages of culture, the silences of identity. A work in motion, at the crossroads of the visible and the invisible.