Only Breath
A site-specific, somatic exploration
of a neglected shore on the Red Sea, Hurghada, Egypt .The exhibited work titled “Only Breath” is from a larger body of photographic work titled: ”Where the wind waits” (2022–2025).
The site—a meeting of two walls on the shoreline—became a liminal space, a threshold between one state or place and another.
My image-making process is kinaesthetic—rooted in movement, touch, and felt experience. Sight becomes something embodied, dissolving the boundary between observer and observed. The moving body is not merely something to be seen, but a generator of seeing itself.
Hurghada, once a modest fishing village, has expanded into one of the largest resort destinations along the Red Sea coast. The landscape is marked by vast, all-inclusive developments designed to contain the tourist experience within their boundaries. Beyond these walls, scattered across the arid terrain, lie half-built or abandoned structures—concrete shells weathered by wind and salt, standing like quiet monuments to time, aspiration, and erosion.
It was within one of these in-between spaces that I began to work—drawn by an eerie stillness, the rhythm of the sea air, and the sensory weight of the place. Sun-bleached debris, rotting wood, and salt crystals clinging stubbornly to every surface spoke of both presence and neglect, belonging and abandonment.
In this landscape, I leaned into vulnerability, waiting and listening—allowing wind, light, and ancestral memory to guide the work. What emerged was an embodied dialogue between land and self, between the visible and the felt, the living and the forgotten.
