Amalia

Each return to France is accompanied by a familiar phrase — “safe travels” — though it often resonates more deeply as “stay strong.” Beneath these words lies a layered history, one shaped by displacement, resilience, and inherited memory.

For previous generations, this journey, begun over sixty years ago, was not a passage but an exile. Many left with visions of a prosperous France, only to encounter the harsh realities of precarious living conditions in informal settlements. These experiences, both intimate and collective, continue to echo across time.

Memory, in this context, does not remain stable. It fragments, disperses, and reconfigures itself into a constellation of trajectories. Identity emerges as something hybrid and shifting — a field of forces where past and present overlap. Like light bending through a prism, recollection becomes altered, distorted, giving rise to an aberrant yet persistent narrative.

This mapping transforms personal and historical memory into a luminous, spatial experience, where perception itself becomes a site of reconstruction.

Mapping created for Fête des Lumières, Lyon, France, 2024.