»Project ‘Oran’ begins with my grandmother. Through her photographs, letters and fragments of life, I returned to a place I had never known yet carried within me. Her archives became a point of departure — a way to approach a history shaped by memory, absence, and transmission.«
As the granddaughter of a »Pied-Noir« (a term used to describe the French population in Algeria during the violent French colonial rule from 1830 to 1962), Margot Wallard seeks to reflect the fluidity and mutability of memory and to expand it through a new perspective.
During her visits to Oran between 2018 and 2020, she explored the city with her camera and, while her biographical search for traces of the past, encountered a new generation: present, complex, and self-determined. This resulted in portrait series centered around the Bonbon Café, she photographed street scenes, urban vegetation, and the still-evident traces of the colonial past in the cityscape.
In her exhibition, Margot Wallard interweaves her grandmother’s photo archive with her own images from Algeria and with photographs she took of her grandmother during her final years in France.