الشاعر علي جرمون قصة زبيدة و ياسين من السيرة الهلالية
Crawling on the Dust is a ten-year ongoing journey shaped by my friendship with Haj Hani El Sayed, a nomadic Bedouin in Egypt’s Nile Delta. Hani’s family once took pride in their deep knowledge of navigating the lands, but now, that knowledge no longer allows them to pursue this lifestyle they inherited because of the relentless sprawl of urban expansion and continuous change.Through Haj Hani’s family’s different generations, I have witnessed different modes of imagining an otherwise. Some, like Hani, remain adhered to an inherited nomadic rhythm,moving between temporary lands. Others, like his son Selim—whom I have photographed since his childhood—have sought escape across the Mediterranean. After nearly a year on a dangerous route, Selim reached Italy. Decades earlier, Hani had tried the same route but was pulled back, bound once more to the nomadic life he was born into in Delta.These images wander with the everyday rhythms of a nomadic bedouin life, always on the move. We see it through the slow steps of a donkey, the harshness and heat of the tents, the long and tiresome routes maneuvering urban overstretching, the intimate and complex relationship with animals. To understand what it means to belong to temporary lands, and to reflect on alternative meanings of road, imagination and crawling as a rhythm of resistance.With Hani, we move following something as unstable and uncertain as dust.