With spirits and Tribes - Benin

This is a journey through Benin, a narrow ribbon of West Africa where time moves to the rhythm of drums and distant tides. For decades, the country drifted in obscurity — forgotten by maps of tourism, sheltered by its own silences. Yet within those silences, life pulsed: ceremonies whispered to the spirits, hands built homes of earth, and faces carried stories written in ink and scar. Over the last ten years, Benin has stepped softly back into the world — not remade, but revealed. My camera follows this revelation. It listens to the language of architecture and ritual, where each wall, shrine, and gesture becomes a verse in the same poem. We begin in the tropical South, in the realm of the Voodoo, its cosmology, where gods inhabit clay and dance moves through bodies like wind through flame. The air hums with salt and incense. Afro-Brazilian façades — baroque and sun-worn — stand as echoes of return, of memory folding back on itself. Then, the path turns north. The land opens wide. The sea’s breath gives way to the dry murmur of savannah. Here, among Muslim traders and nomadic tribes, the forms change — adobe villages rise like sculptures of light and dust, and skin becomes a canvas for lineage, belief, and belonging. This work is a tribute to that meeting of body and landscape, to a country where architecture is still handmade, and the spirit still speaks in everyday gestures.