Fez — The Fondation Maison du Maroc in Paris will open “Les Gardiens du Silence” (The Guardians of Silence) on May 28, presenting a photography exhibition by Moroccan artists Zakaria Mtilk and Noureddine El Magouri.
The exhibition brings together twenty framed photographs from Imilchil, in Morocco’s Middle Atlas, where winter snow, summer aridity, isolation, and mountain life shape both landscape and human presence.
The series is built around a simple visual idea: silence is not emptiness, but a language carried by faces, gestures, stone, wind, and daily endurance.
A portrait of Imilchil without spectacle
“Les Gardiens du Silence” approaches Imilchil through restraint. The photographs do not turn hardship into drama or folklore into decoration. Instead, they move slowly through the village, its plateaus, children, elders, workers, games, and winter routines.
The series presents Imilchil as a place where nature and human life answer each other quietly. In the photographs, the cold is not only weather. It becomes texture, posture, and memory. A child plays in snow. A woman moves forward with the force of someone carrying more than the visible world. A man stands rooted in a vast landscape that “teaches” without speaking.
Several titles sharpen that atmosphere. “Le village blanc” (The White Village) captures a brief ray of sunlight falling over a mountain settlement. “Le bois et le givre” (Wood and Frost) turns the act of cutting wood into a small victory against cold. “La partie du village” (The Village Game) shows pétanque as a moment of concentration, shadow, light, and shared stillness.
Two Essaouira eyes on the Middle Atlas
The exhibition is also a meeting between two Moroccan photographers from Essaouira whose work shares a deep attachment to black and white.
Noureddine El Magouri, born in Essaouira in 1976, works between reality and silence. A notary by profession, he treats photography as an act of contemplation and truth, seeking human presence in its simplest and most spiritual form. His images focus on portraits, landscapes, light, and the quiet dignity of the people he encounters.
Zakaria Mtilk, born in Essaouira in 1988, is a self-taught photographer shaped by the history, spirituality, colors, sounds, and traditions of his coastal city. Through black and white, he captures faces, streets, and ordinary scenes as visual poetry, using photography as a way to explore Moroccan traditions and the depth of human experience.
Together, Mtilk and El Magouri turn Imilchil into a visual meditation rather than a documentary inventory. Their photographs do not shout. They ask viewers to stay long enough for silence to become readable.
Twenty images of endurance
The exhibition’s list of works includes “Je suis la nature” (I Am Nature), “Je n’ai pas raté ma vie” (I Did Not Fail My Life), “Bonjour, au revoir” (Hello, Goodbye), “Le pirate des montagnes” (The Mountain Pirate), “Hssain,” “Suspendu” (Suspended), “Imilchil Generation (Z),” and “Je reste ici” (I Stay Here).
The titles suggest a world where identity, belonging, movement, and stillness all pass through the same mountain rhythm.
What gives the series its force is its refusal to separate beauty from difficulty. Imilchil appears harsh and generous, poor and rich in human presence, isolated and open through hospitality. The photographs frame ordinary gestures as carriers of memory: walking, playing, waiting, carrying, watching, staying.
