"We are aware of silence. We didn't hear it straight away, only realising at first that it was a false silence, something like the reverse of a rumbling, but already so alien to everything we know, to everything we have learned to listen to and appreciate, that we stayed a long time, spent a moment before paying attention to it. Then he raised his peremptory presence around us. We can hear him now. We are all listening to him". Mohammed Dib.  

One of the great questions facing photography is the way in which a particular work can acquire a collective significance. It may be said that it's a question of subject matter. But the subjects that seem most unifying merely translate into images the equivalent of unanimism in literature, in which an author set out to express "collective states of mind". Such an attempt may or may not be successful, but it says nothing new about the photographic experience as such. 

My path crossed that of Walter Benjamin on my way to Portbou, an area I had never been to before, where I discovered the Mediterranean light of the day and the deep darkness of the night. I took some photos wandering around the village on the evening of 26 September 2021, where, apart from the darkness that surrounded me, I felt a particular tension that day, emanating from the very present elements... 

Portbou is the last piece of land that welcomed Walter Benjamin before he took his own life on 26 September 1940, after being forced into exile from one country to another. Walter's story is timeless, because there will always be Walter's, fleeing war, injustice, radicalism and judgement, because they are different in their thoughts, their positions, their skin colours, their morphologies and their origins. This is certainly a dark vision, but it is that of a world that never ceases to reject hospitality, repeating and reliving history. 

Houari Bouchenak / Ardor it's you, it's me, it's him - Polysemies of silence 

Support Assembly: Laboratori EGM 

Collaboration: Sabers migrants 

Production: Jiser 

Aknowledgements: Paula Durán, Xavier de Luca and Sabers migrants 

Houari Bouchenak (Oran, Algeria, 1981) is an Algerian photographer, curator and cultural manager.  Self-taught in his photographic practice, he began capturing scenes from the daily lives of those around him at the age of 10. In 2006, he joined the association La Grande Maison in Tlemcen (Algeria), which enabled him to experiment with photographic storytelling based on literary narratives. A few years later, he strengthened his practice by training at the Université Paul Valéry (Montpellier) and at the Magnum Photos agency (Paris), but it is the encounters and collaborations with different photographers and artists that have nurtured his practice. 

A member and co-founder of Collectif 220 (www.collective220.net ), and founder and manager of La Maison de La Photo (Tlemcen/Algeria), he has taught photography in the art and architecture departments at the University of Tlemcen. With a degree in industrial chemistry, he went on to study Cultural and Intercultural Project Engineering (IPCI), then  

Research and Creation in Fine Arts at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne. His photographic work has been exhibited in Algeria, Germany, China, Spain, France, Italy, Morocco, Mali, Tunisia and Switzerland.  

His reflections are nourished by literature as well as by cinema, philosophy and contemporary art. His work is essentially concerned with what constitutes the human condition through spaces of time marked by memory, displacement and trace.  For him, the medium of photography is not only a language, but also a field of plastic and curatorial experimentation, fuelled by the desire to regenerate creation through the immanent action of praxis.