This work began during a month-long residency inside the Gibraltar Nature Reserve, where I lived and worked in exchange with wildlife biologists studying the Barbary macaques. I was drawn there by a historical thread — the upheavals following the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the music of rebetiko, which carries the voice of the xenos, the stranger in one’s own homeland. In Gibraltar, I observed how the macaques retreat each evening from the tourist stage to the cliff, a nightly withdrawal that resonated with these themes of displacement. Rather than reproduce the spectacle of animals or tourists, I chose to photograph only the limestone rock face at night, illuminated by the city’s artificial light, as a way of showing absence and estrangement. The work is installed wall-height, sometimes split by an opening or passage, so that the image itself becomes architectural — a rupture the viewer must walk through, echoing the discontinuities and thresholds that first inspired the project.
