Amzrou Synagogue Interior, Series II, No. 2, 2009 (excerpt)
Running Time: 1:57 minutes / HD / colour
Dust is illuminated by light in the interior of the Amzrou Synagogue, a Kasbah in Southern Morocco.
Camera: Sylvia Safdie
Editing: Patrick Andrew Boivin, Sylvia Safdie
Audio: Silent
thousands of particles dance in a pool of light
like stars in another planet
their magnitude unknown
patterns of vivid strands
fluffy with dust,
delicate as silk,
tangled, they shiver
announcing the sky
Note: The subject of the Moroccan series concerns the Jewish Berbers of southern Morocco who lived there for 2500 years. The work is a poetic evocation of a place and marks the dispersion of a society from its home, its place of origin. It is the result of research, interviews and several trips that I made to southern Morocco, starting in 1981 that culminated in a series of videos, photographs and drawings.
This video was shown at the exhibition Amzrou/Morocco at Galerie J. Yahouda, Montréal in 2013.