**the taxi that changed**
**my trajectory**

The year was 2016 (2015, maybe). My friend Hamza dragged me to a photobook workshop at L'Uzine.
It was free, so I went. We took two white taxis and, of course, arrived late.

Daniel and Matt let us in anyway.
They had brought a selection of photobooks. One of them was American Cowboy by Karoliina Paatos.I remember being puzzled by the design.
Vast landscapes stretched across the gutter while the portraits sat much smaller on the page.
Why not make everything neat? Equal? Proper?
Matt explained that the landscapes embodied the cowboys' longing for open space.
Another book used page after page of blackness to convey the immensity of the cosmos.
Then they showed us Infinito by David Jiménez. Those urban and dreamlike diptychs doubled (ad infinitum) completely blew my mind.

I began to understand that photobooks carried entire worlds.
Each created its own language, its own rules.
No technology required beyond attention.

Then we made our own dummies.
They had asked us to bring forty photographs.
The only thing I had forty photographs of was Eid.

At first, I crammed every spread with as many images as possible. (Paper is expensive.)
Again, they talked about rhythm. Space. Letting things breathe. (something I struggle with to this day)

When the dummy was finished, the Moroccan participants commented on regional details.
The foreigners were delighted to glimpse intimate family scenes they would normally not have access to.
Access.
That, I realized, was my superpower.
Like a wall-crosser, I could access worlds that rarely met.

After the workshop, I felt strangely shaken.
"Come on, Souki," a friend told me. "You've been to a creative workshop. It's not that big a deal."
But something was stirring deep below the surface.
For years, I had been doing everything I could to become a proper adult. A techie. Someone sensible. Reliable.
Even if it meant cutting off a part of myself. But that part had never stopped calling.
It was time to bring her back home.