In 80 Miles to Atlantis, the second part of her work around the city of Tarfaya, Imane Djamil works closely with a group of friends born amongst the ruins, in search of a long lost time they haven’t known, fantasized from a nostalgia point of view. Together, they reinvest in desolation as a playground and the ruin as an element to reclaim in this collaboration. The series interrogates the multiple layers of symbolism in the built and natural landscape, colonial architecture’s redefinition over time, and the blurring of lines between reality and myth. The themes her work explores are of poignant relevance to today’s world – the quest for a symbiosis between urban development and the natural environment, the state’s failure to uplift communities at the margins, and negotiating relationships between the colonial past and a post-colonial present and future. Through her practice, Djamil never ceases to confront the complexity of people vis-à-vis their physical environment. The title of the series refers to Tarfaya not by its name, but rather its close proximity to Spain’s Canary Islands, the approximate location of where the mythical Atlantis is rumored to be. The title also likens Tarfaya to the fictional island nation – a fitting relation given that, like Atlantis, it is shrouded in mystery and often described as “apocalyptic” or “the abandoned world.”

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80 Miles to Atlantis