Sidi Salem, on the shores of Annaba Bay, was once a French colonial regroupment camp. A place meant to be temporary, which became permanent. Here, space shapes bodies, modulates presence, and dictates absence.
This suspended territory imposes its own rhythms. Men leave by sea, often without return. Those who remain relearn how to live with emptiness. Women hold the interiors in silence. Children wander through streets without adults, where walls lead nowhere.
At the edge of the former camp, some buy facades: a door planted in a wall, with nothing behind it. A simulation of habitation, a bet on the future. To be counted. To exist on a register, waiting for relocation. The boundary between the inhabited and the unfinished blurs.
Through photography, I document these constrained geographies: interiors saturated with traces, exteriors emptied of presence. Bodies are sculpted by topography—postures, gestures, stillness. The archive appears in fragments, emerging within the spaces themselves—on a wall, a table, a corner—not as memory, but as a reactivation of the cycle of erasure and reappearance.
Sidi Salem is a threshold. Too narrow to contain, too rigid to release. To inhabit it is to constantly negotiate with disappearance.