“If I lean on sleeplessness, I return to the greatest amazement
I travel with the birds in my agony
and I arrange my defenses in the avalanche or the feverish months
I’m not passing through and I don’t know how to hesitate, although I listen
under my feet, like an underground air
the rumor of my innocence
I am the unescorted passerby who prolongs the path.””

— Esdras Parra

Digital photography. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2023.

In the desert, everything that appears solid is actually in constant motion. This is most palpable at the desert’s edge, where immense structures rise amidst migrating bodies, cranes, dunes, and a horizon that dazzles with its sense of infinity.

Tomorrow, it will be something else entirely.

Building and destroying sometimes merge into a single act.

In that moment, permanence is compromised; forms shatter and transcend—much like our -migrants- bodies—as we reconfigure ourselves, absorbed by the ceaseless movement of the landscapes that traverse our lives and our dreams.

Now,

what remains of a person in spaces that will never become home—places that serve merely as waypoints on a migratory journey that seems to stretch longer with each passing year?

Long before it was a city, the desert was displacement, a surface in ceaseless flux. And how does this translate into a migrant’s life? It means living with a daily sense of transience. A perpetual state of going—always moving toward somewhere—a migration that never halts; for even as the years go by, we are always departing towards somewhere else.