White Dream

There is always something thin and imaginary that creates a distance between fear and calm—yet also binds anxiety to hope. Like a frail, translucent membrane that can be brushed aside with a fingertip, after which the naked truth appears. Truth lies outside that veil. The real world resides in the empty gray of the room, in the poverty of its walls. But the migrant’s world settles beneath the soft whiteness of that gauze. Through it, the room’s darkness grows diluted in his eyes.

The photograph insists on the symbolic value of the object: that piece of fabric hanging from a rope, in the bareness and nothingness of the room, stands as the only enduring and luminous hope. Like a firm and protective structure that grants the dream permission to remain. The migrant possesses nothing except that pale curtain he wraps around himself—and he knows that without it, sleep would be impossible.