The Taste of Black Residue

On the walls of Tangier’s Kasbah, salt corrodes colonial stone. In the Rif, the soil still carries traces of mustard gas dropped a century ago. The Taste of Black Residue is a long-form black-and-white psychological documentary that traces how post-conflict endures across Morocco—a conduit between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, territories historically bound by colonization.Nearly two decades after my deployment to the Middle East, I returned to a landscape not marked by visible war. Although Morocco is rarely described as post-conflict, it bears the enduring imprint of French, Portuguese, and Spanish rule. This work challenges conventional war photography by turning away from active combat and toward its aftermath. It is not the gaze of an outside witness, but of someone who once participated and now returns to observe.From the harbour walls of Tangier to Marrakech’s colonial boulevards, from the desert plateaus of Agafay to the tanneries of Tétouan, these locations form a cartography of colonial legacy. In each place, the residue of conflict manifests differently: in the gesture of a woman holding an orange at the meeting point of two seas, in a leaning cross embedded in a cemetery wall, in soldiers stationed at the gates of Aït Benhaddou. Together, these fragments create a network—geographical, thematic, and relational—through which the afterlife of conflict becomes visible.