Modro mesto – Chefchaouen: The Blue City

On 20 September 2026, Modro mesto – Chefchaouen closed its doors at Galerija EDA, ending a two-month run that carried visitors from the edge of the Julian Alps straight into the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco.

Hosted in the Eda Center — the glass-and-steel landmark in the heart of Nova Gorica — the exhibition presented a concentrated body of colour photographs by Dušan Gorast Miška, all devoted to a single subject: Chefchaouen, the world-famous "Blue City." The show was listed in the official programme of GO! 2025, the cross-border European Capital of Culture shared by Nova Gorica and Gorizia, and organised by Foto klub Nova Gorica with free admission throughout.

Conceived as a visual journey, the exhibition celebrated the pioneering use of colour to render a place suspended between history and spirituality. Rather than documenting the city in the manner of travel reportage, Miška's series performed a slow, in-depth aesthetic analysis: walls that shift from powder to indigo with the hour, staircases that dissolve into pure chromatic gradient, doorways that read as abstract colour-field compositions. The result was less a portrait of a city than an essay on a single colour and its infinite modulations.

The City Behind the Colour

Chefchaouen was founded in 1471, and after 1492 it was profoundly shaped by refugees fleeing Al-Andalus — an urban fabric where Moroccan and Andalusian influences still interlace in every alley.

Jewish tradition added the city's signature: the practice of washing buildings in blue is rooted in the Kabbalistic association of the colour with the sky and the divine, reinforced over time by eminently practical benefits — the lime-based pigment is said to cool the streets and discourage insects.

Whatever its origin, the effect is total. The medina reads as a single continuous sculpture in blue, interrupted only by terracotta pots, woven textiles, citrus trees and the occasional flash of a doorway in ochre or gold. It is precisely this tension — monochrome field against rare accent — that the exhibition set out to photograph.

A staircase as chromatic gradient — the medina's steps shift tone with the light

The Photographer

Pattern within monochrome — mosaic and shadow inside the blue field

Dušan Gorast Miška is a prominent figure of Slovenian art colour photography and a leading exponent of the Nova Gorica school.

Holder of the title Master of Photography of the Photographic Federation of Slovenia (MF FZS) and the international EFIAP distinction, Miška is a longstanding member of Foto klub Nova Gorica and serves on the FZS Artistic Committee, where he helps review and shape the national photography contest. Modro mesto – Chefchaouen was his solo exhibition, prepared under the banner of his home club.

The Nova Gorica school of colour photography — to which this show makes a considered contribution — treats colour not as decoration but as the structural argument of the image. In Miška's Chefchaouen series, that argument finds its ideal testing ground: a city that has already done the work of reducing itself to a palette.

The Case for Colour

Beyond its subject, the exhibition advanced a claim about the medium itself: that good colour photography obeys aesthetic criteria different from black-and-white — and must be judged on its own terms.

Through his lens, Miška advocated for the distinct expressive criteria of colour photography, establishing its independence from the older monochrome tradition. In Chefchaouen, hue is not a layer applied to form; it is the form. Composition becomes a negotiation between saturations, and light is measured in shifts of blue rather than contrasts of grey.

Seen in the white cube of Galerija EDA, the series asked visitors to slow down and read colour the way they would read line or shadow — an exercise that lingered long after leaving the gallery, and one that secured the exhibition a distinctive place within the GO! 2025 season.

The Subject — Chefchaouen in Frames

Mosaic, wrought iron, geraniums — detail as counterpoint

Against the blue: a gilded doorway — the accents that make the dominant colour sing

Every narrow street demands a frame of its own

Every staircase a study in gradient

Images above are views of Chefchaouen, the subject of the exhibited series by Dušan Gorast Miška.