Frontiers, markers, passages

Contemporary history reveals unforeseen patterns to us, in which the walls erected between individuals and nations create unequal territories. Under the indefinite movement of a humanity in transit, the contemporary political and economic order has engendered space without place: a space that shatters the sense of a place, defines it as a territory for the deracinated: a topos deprived of people who have put down roots there. In this context, figures that are intimately associated with a territorial space – the displaced, refugees, the exiled, the errant – are re-created there.

The photographs do not show the people themselves, nor does the text present the locations. But the people’s words are marked by the places, in the same way that the places, though empty in the images, are marked by the people. And the work grew out of this joint presence, or what the sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad would have called a "double absence".