The most intimate project by oud player, composer and photographer Grégory Dargent. It began with a sentence his father spoke on the day of his mother’s funeral: “I remember… I was 12. I watched Algiers recede, never to return.” In that second Dargent understood that he had inherited not only family memories but an absence, a void, a nostalgia that did not say its name. The book tries to repair a memory, to ask what we pass on in spite of ourselves and how art can turn lack into gesture and loss into light. After years of travelling through the Arab world, he saw that his images were attempts to fill that void: perforated landscapes, ghostly silhouettes, bodies erased by acid, seas without horizon, empty rooms, wounded architecture. They lead from a ferry bound for Algiers to Cairo’s City of the Dead, the alleys of the Near East and the solitude of a room or a desert, where every face becomes a ghost and every landscape a memory surfacing.