Jardin d'essai is Maude Grübel's first book, a set of photographs made in and around Algiers between 2009 and 2014, alternating urban views with portraits and landscapes. Walls, facades, roads, burnt woods, distant bodies and close figures, statues and organic fabrics follow one another, marked by a history that never finishes passing and returning, an archaeology of the present where, facing the muteness of the visible, the gaze remains serene, almost surgical, yet strangely lyrical in the way it suggests, through texture and outer fissures, the weave and cracks of the intimate.