“The word fantasy is a member of the rich word family to which fanciful, fantasise and fantastic also belong. It also refers to a free-form musical genre which offers a short break on the margins of traditional compositional rules.

Hicham Benohoud is a fanciful spirit: he needed to be both bold and imaginative to ask the inhabitants of a house whether they would allow him to make holes in their walls and floors to let hands, feet and faces protrude. In the digital era, where everything has become visually possible, where the borders between reality and the imaginary are increasingly porous, and where truth and falsehood have become entangled, Hicham Benohoud resists the temptation to retouch and re-arrange his photos. He wants his pictures to show things as they really happened.

The photos are taken in real interiors and not on stage sets, and the people emerging from the holes are real inhabitants of Marrakech and not actors. Following the photo shoots, the houses return to their usual appearance and life returns to normal. What then is the meaning of this artistic project, a digression which cannot be understood as a mere technical or physical performance? The same question is also relevant to the series of acrobats: characters that Hicham Benohoud met in Marrakech town centre and whom he asked to repeat their performance back home, with their families, in front of his camera. Beyond the playful spirit that animates them, these scenes have other resonances. They seem to follow a certain recipe for the concoction of a world full of wonder, associating piercing holes and performing acrobatics with the idea of escapism and transcendence. But in fact, it is all just a humble parody and the real world returns full force.”