Timizar is an on-going photographic research project that explores Berber culture and landscape in the Anti-Atlas mountains of southwestern Morocco.
Timizar can be translated to English as ‘Homeland’. The community living in the mountains is surrounded by various tensions, one of which is the gendered perception of the word homeland. Deeply gendered spatial distinctions are between emigrant men working in cities most of the year, and mountain-dwelling women working the land – had led men to associate the countryside with longing, experienced through nostalgia, whereas women associated it with hard labour. Walking through the village makes you feel like it's abandoned, seeing crumbling ruins of old houses surrounded or overgrown with vegetation and  dusty dirt paths where only a few people can be seen after strolling down the streets. The cause of this notable occurrence would be that even though women are there, they are not seen - hidden in the houses, working, in contrast men are not there but their impact is visible by leaving traces, which are most visible in the architecture.
Dwellings in the Anti-Atlas mountains are typically made of stone and mud. Men working away, on the other hand, imported not only Arabic language but also architecture from larger cities. This outside influence left a tangible impact on the land in the form of big, colourful cinder block houses built around the stone village's periphery. The contradictory architecture and the absence of people can be seen in the images taken there. By keeping the images silent, empty and quiet I want to bring attention to the details in the landscape and architecture caused by the gender division.