stress position

As an author, a citizen, and a mother, I feel a deep need to articulate a response to the silent, ongoing violence shaping the lives of so many young migrants. My attention turned in particular to Moroccan and Algerian boys who, as minors, left their homes and crossed the Mediterranean alone. After months of conversations within prison walls—marked by silence, sorrow, and occasional laughter—I gained the perspective necessary to set the coordinates of this work. Their willingness to engage, to co-create, and to place their trust and bodies in the process is what allowed the images to emerge. It was through listening, witnessing, and holding space for their stories that the work took form.

The resulting large-format images aim to dismantle the dominant narratives around migration and the criminalization of poverty through a choreography of brutalized bodies. These young men reenact, with their bodies, a journey that led not to a promised future, but into an administrative labyrinth where the migrant body becomes an anomaly to be managed, neutralized, and confined. The unadorned images lay bare the necropolitical conditions of a system that responds to the question of survival with nothing but walls and cells.

This series functions as both a counter-archive and a radical performative act that challenges the hegemonic visual regime. It reveals how border and penal systems operate as interconnected technologies of a colonial and biopolitical order, in which legality and illegality are arbitrarily imposed on racialized bodies. The work does not merely represent violence—it embodies it. Through a raw and deliberate material presentation, every choice—from the absence of glass to the use of industrial framing—transforms the piece into a political volume: a sculpture of confinement and resistance, where viewer, image, and institution are locked in a choreography of tension.