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. I became particularly interested in Moroccan and Algerian boys who, as minors, left their homes and crossed the Mediterranean alone. After months of conversations held within prison walls—conversations marked by silence, sorrow, and occasional laughter—I gained the perspective necessary to propose the coordinates of the 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 lives. The resulting large-format images aim to dismantle the dominant narrative around migration and the criminalization of poverty through a choreography of brutalized bodies. These young men reenact, with their bodies, a journey that did not lead 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 expose the necropolitical conditions of a system that offers only walls and cells in response to the question of survival.

This series forms a counter-archive and a radical performative act that challenges the hegemonic visual regime. It reveals how border and penal systems are interconnected technologies of a colonial and biopolitical order, where 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 the viewer, the image, and the institution are locked in a choreography of tension.