Skander Khlif’s latest photographic series, “Where Dust and Water Dream Together,” navigates the porous boundaries between aridity and fertility in Tunisia’s shifting terrains.
With a gaze rooted in lyrical precision, Khlif captures landscapes not as static backdrops, but as living systems in negotiation—where sandstorms and sea tides blur the line between decay and renewal. His images operate as quiet meditations on survival, evoking a visual language where elemental forces collide and coalesce, suggesting that resilience lies in the space between.
The work leans into the Gaia hypothesis not as a scientific claim, but as a metaphor for interdependence. Through each photograph, Khlif constructs an ecological narrative—one where human presence is neither dominant nor absent, but intrinsically embedded in the texture of the land. His lens tracks the legacy of ancestral adaptation and suggests that tradition, far from being static, is a dynamic method of ecological attunement. By doing so, the series interrogates whether sustainable futures might emerge not from dominion over nature, but from renewed synchrony with it.
What emerges is not a romanticized vision of the environment, but a sober reflection on its precarity. Tunisia becomes a microcosm of broader environmental tensions, where rising seas and encroaching deserts mirror global anxieties. Yet within this fragility, Khlif offers a vision of poetic resistance—where beauty arises not in spite of erosion, but through it. His images feel less like documentation and more like elegies, reminding us that to protect a place, we must first learn to see it.
