The island on the island

It all started with a cupboard. At first sight the cupboard is nothing special, but it’s played a fundamental role in the research I’ve been conducting for several years. It’s found in my grandparent’s house in the south of France. It contains everything a photographer with archival tendencies could dream of: heaps of images without dates, names or geographical indications. I knew they were family photos, and photos that my grandfather – a sailor – took during his trips in the Mediterranean. In these images, I was struck by a frightening, omnipresent character: the water. The whiteness of the limestone cliffs above, the tiny figures on unknown beaches, my grandmother's body submerged in Corsican rivers, and dazzling reflections on the sea during the hot summers in Marseille. Waves – whole sequences of waves in black and white, surely taken from the deck of the boat. But where? At the centre of the sea. Nowhere. Everywhere. 

The territory of the Mediterranean, whose tales I’ve heard since I was born, became an obscure myth engulfed by these waters; a mysterious space that I’m told was the foundation of Western civilization. This sea – these places – should be the foundation of a common identity of which mine is part. 

But what do we really mean when we talk about the Mediterranean? I went there myself, to try to see with my own eyes those places that the archives first showed me. I did not, though, find the places where these images were made, nor did I discover the ‘truth’ of this territory. I worked instead as a kind of melancholic archaeologist, reporting on what’s absent, phantasmagorical, and what’s completely invented in memories.

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