For the past year I have been waiting for something to happen. I don’t know exactly what. I thought I would recognize it when it came.
After this trip, maybe. After this exhibition. When I move. When I leave. Next month.

In the meantime, life became strangely full.

My apartment was always filled with sun. From the window I could see Marché Central. My
friends lived five minutes away and we made dinner, went dancing, played very bad music. I bought a guitar and learned a few things. I watched films until morning, sometimes three in one night. For a while I thought I wanted to make cinema. I walked through Casablanca a lot.

Some days I felt completely visible and some days I felt like I was speaking to people from underneath the ground. They could hear me, but I was somewhere else.
At Marché Central I would sit and eat fish. The first time someone there remembered me I was surprised. Then they started knowing what I wanted, making jokes, calling me over.

Sometimes I was given free oysters. These very small things made me happy. Eventually I knew their names too.

I was becoming familiar with a place I was already thinking of leaving.

I think a lot of this year has been like that.

I was looking forward while constantly finding pieces of what I thought I had left behind. In painting it happened without my permission. I wanted new images, new ways of working, new questions, but an old gesture would suddenly appear. A body, a room, an animal, a landscape.

There were days when I didn’t particularly want to paint, so I started with colors I loved, almost as a way of tricking myself into wanting to stay with the painting. Pink, green, blue, red. If I liked looking at the color long enough, maybe something would happen inside it.

Windows started appearing everywhere. I liked that they could hold two places at once.

You can be inside a room and still look somewhere very far away. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I was painting a window, another room, a painting inside the painting, or simply somewhere else. I didn’t really need to decide.

My hands seemed less interested in change than I was.

I started wondering if we ever really leave anything behind.

Meanwhile, every day, the news brought somewhere else into the room. Wars, violence, images of people living through things I could only witness through a screen. Things happening thousands of kilometres away could reach me before I had even gotten out of bed. I could spend hours looking, reading, scrolling, trying to understand, until the distance between here and there became very strange. Then the screen went dark and the room was still the room.

The painting was still waiting.

Sometimes it felt absurd to return to it.

To worry about a color, a hand, the position of a body, while somewhere else a war was still happening, someone was losing a home, a body, a person. I wanted to look outside and kept returning to myself. I wanted the paintings to hold something of the world beyond me, but somehow I was always somewhere inside them.

I kept wondering how to let the world into the paintings without forcing it. How much of the world can enter a painting before it becomes something else? And how much of myself can I remove from it before it is no longer mine?

I don’t know if these are questions I am trying to answer. They are just there.

For a while I thought change would feel more spectacular. That one day I would wake up on the other side of something and know I had arrived.

Instead things changed quietly.

I changed the music I listened to. I changed the city. I changed my routine. Strangers learned my name. I learned theirs. I started looking for another country while becoming attached to a neighbourhood. I wanted my paintings to become something else and kept recognizing myself in them.

In between doubt and achievement, sorrow and gratitude, what’s next and yesterday.

I’m still waiting for something to happen.

Or maybe something is happening all the time and I keep mistaking it for waiting.