Field notes from the road.

The first entry should refuse the easy opening shot. Marrakesh is medina threshold, craft labour, tourism, heat, hospitality, traffic and performance. It is also a city with its own life before the travellers arrive.

The strongest beginning asks what kind of guest the archive becomes. What will it carry carefully, what will it misunderstand, and what should it leave uncollected?

South of Agadir the road narrows to a single intention: keep the Atlantic on the right and the desert on the left, and let the two surfaces argue. By Dakhla, on its long sand spit between lagoon and ocean, we will have driven past fish-landing points, wind farms, checkpoints and fuel stops that the map flattens into one blue line. We intend to hold that line open.

This leg will test our patience before it tests our endurance. The Guerguerat crossing into Mauritania is documents, queueing and the slow grant of permission; the road to Nouadhibou and Nouakchott is wind, heat haze and the iron-ore railway running parallel to nothing. We will try to record duration as honestly as we record distance, because waiting is most of what a border actually is.

We will refuse to turn this scale into spectacle. The empty horizon photograph is easy and it lies, because it erases the fish workers, the mechanics, the border staff and the drivers whose labour makes the passage possible. Where we cannot name or credit a person, we intend to photograph the trace of the work rather than the worker, and to say plainly when we did not understand what we saw.

The field question for this module is not how far we cover in a day. It is what the distance asked of the body, what the wait asked of our temper, and whose work we leaned on without always being able to thank them.

At Dakar the corridor turns its back on the Atlantic and heads inland, east through Tambacounda and across the Senegal-Mali border near Kayes towards Bamako on the Niger. This is the leg where the scenery stops doing the explaining for us. River, Sahel, market towns, language shifts from Wolof to Bambara to more besides: we will pass through all of it at the speed of a vehicle, which is to say too fast to claim we understood it.

Bamako will be the densest thing we encounter since departure, a city of two banks and many bridges over the Niger. We intend to write this module against overclaiming. Road towns, repairs, night stops and crowded stations will be visible to us, but visibility is not comprehension, and a photograph taken from a moving window is a souvenir, not a finding.

The honest form here is a field note with the gaps left in: what we genuinely observed, what we only assumed, who could correct us, and what should wait for a slower return conversation rather than be published as fact. We would rather post one uncertain sentence and mark it uncertain than post three confident ones we cannot stand behind.

We will refuse the tidy transect that pretends a country can be read at 90 kilometres an hour. Where we are guessing, we intend to say so on the face of the entry, so the archive carries our doubt as part of the record.

From Kumasi the route drops to the coast at Accra and then runs east along a dense ribbon of borders: Aflao into Togo at Lomé, the short hop across Benin through Grand-Popo, Cotonou and Porto-Novo, and finally the Seme and Badagry approaches into Nigeria. In a single day this leg can cross more frontiers than the previous three modules combined. We intend to let each one slow the entry down.

We will try to read this corridor as layered infrastructure rather than scenery: road over port over market over currency over language over weather. A West African coastal city is rarely one thing at a time, and we want the archive to show ports working beside fish markets, formal borders beside informal crossings, ECOWAS free movement beside the friction that persists in practice.

We will not ask the crossing to be smooth, because it will not be, and pretending otherwise would erase the negotiation, the fatigue and the hospitality that actually carry travellers across. We intend to annotate where movement slows, and to ask what the slowing reveals about who the corridor is built for.

The field question for this module is what each crossing organises, what the coast remembers, and where a border is a relation between people rather than a line on a map. People stay private unless consent is explicit and there is a clear reason to publish.

Arrival should not clean the road into a finished story. Lagos brings density, water, traffic, pressure, cultural production and a demand for editorial honesty.

The final post should show the edit list: publish, hold back, verify, return, ask, delete. The installation material is strongest when it reveals consent choices, gaps, corrections and collective labour.