Drive Through

Three young, white men travel through Morocco. They have assigned themselves a mission and entrusted a photographer with documenting their deeds. Drive Through is the story of a self-assigned mission, in which nothing works out as envisioned.

The essay film relies on a set of photographs, documents of a journey, that are animated through staged gestures, an imaginative handling of ambient sound and a playful inclusion of the weather conditions found on location, while filming.

Drive Through stems from my ongoing, critical engagement with snapshot, documentary and travel photography. Admittedly, broad genres. Nevertheless, a fascination with representing the other and the exotic are widespread in all three. The degree of intertwinement between Here – our homes and lives – and There – other peoples’ homes and lives – is silenced in most such photographic endeavours. Drive Through uses stills and elements of narrative to undertake a partial un-silencing of precisely those issues, while at the same time navigating a pictorial space in which images remain enigmatic. The practice of collage is used with its original force in this work: as gesture of spatial violence.