What remains

Through palm trees and modernist architecture, this project explores Tunisia’s changing landscape, where beauty, decay and memory coexist. It reflects on belonging, resilience and the fragile relationship between a place and its people.

WHAT REMAINS

This photographic project explores my relationship with Tunisia, a country I remain deeply attached to despite the uncertainty, contradictions and transformations that shape everyday life.

Over the past fifteen years, Tunisia has undergone profound political, social and economic changes. Having spent many years living in Paris, I experienced much of this transformation from a distance. This physical and emotional separation gradually shaped my perspective, making me more aware of the gap between the country I carried in my memory and the reality unfolding in my absence. Now spending more time in Tunisia, I find myself looking at familiar landscapes with a renewed sensitivity, drawn to the details, contradictions and traces that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Political and economic instability, shortages, restrictions and deteriorating infrastructure have become part of the landscape. Through photography, I observe the tension between a place I love and the reality of living in it: modernist structures slowly deteriorating beneath palm trees, occasional human presences within these landscapes, and stagnant waters reflecting fragments of a changing environment. Plastic waste, polluted water and neglected spaces reveal the marks of human activity on the natural world, where beauty and environmental degradation exist side by side.

The palm trees recur throughout the images as symbols of endurance, rootedness and vulnerability. They stand as silent witnesses to the passage of time, embodying a landscape that persists even as the structures surrounding them begin to fade. Architecture, water and everyday scenes become traces of a collective memory, revealing the distance between what a place once promised and what it has become.

This project is not simply an observation of decline, but an attempt to understand attachment: why we remain connected to places that disappoint us, and how beauty can coexist with uncertainty. Returning to Tunisia, I find myself caught between familiarity and estrangement, between the desire to leave and the impossibility of fully letting go. Photography becomes a way of navigating this tension, of reconnecting with a place through the very contradictions that make it difficult to inhabit.

Through these fragments of Tunisia, I explore the fragile relationship between people, memory and territory, and the ways in which political, social and environmental changes reshape our sense of belonging.

What remains is not necessarily the country I remember. It is the landscape that persists, the traces of what has been lost, and the feeling that, despite everything, still makes me want to stay.