On the back of a photograph, these few words written in ballpoint pen: “Caserne à Nantes, our first home”. The image was taken in the early 1960s, in a former military prison where the maternal family of Aline Benecke, who immigrated to France in 1962, was housed. Like so many other Algerian families, some of whom are called harkis, allegedly collaborated with the french military forces during the war, she had to leave the country at the time of independence. The photograph, sent by one of her aunts, is one of the rare visual traces of an exile story that the artist is trying to reconstruct. Beyond the gaps and silences, Aline Benecke composes a lexicon both political and poetic to describe the capacities of a diasporic subject to (re) create a home.

This image will be the starting point for an investigation that will take the artist from Berlin to Nantes, Paris, Vincennes and Marseille, to meet documentary and television archives, historians and artists, but also memories of his own family.

How to write a story that hides? How to go beyond the categories imposed by existing political, historical and media accounts? By summoning the tools of architecture and performance, Aline Benecke engages in a moving exercise in critical fabulation to write the possibility of a counter-story that is always in motion.

In partnership with :

• The MO.CO.ESBA – Superior School of Fine Arts of Montpellier
• Esban – Superior School of Fine Arts of Nîmes
• ICI — National Choreographic Center Montpellier-Occitanie / Direction Christian Rizzo
• The isdaT – higher institute of arts of Toulouse