I had spent most of my life – the best part of four decades – wandering the lands between Somalia and Mauritania, when suddenly I had to leave Africa for good and return to France, where I was born.

But it was a false departure. Even though I had left Africa, Africa did no leave me: it lingered in my thoughts, my conversations, even in my dreams. It came creeping back like a shadow from the past moving across the room.

And so it became an imperative – I can say almost a matter of sanity – for me to travel back to a land that has shaped me so profoundly. Each year now, when my work is done, I pack up the house and head back to a continent that I cannot leave, seeking to recreate a world that is already gone.

This project tries to capture the melancholy of parting, the impossibility of leaving and the impossibility of return. It is a yearning for what has slipped away and can never be retrieved. It wants to invite reflection on belonging, loss and the enduring pull of the places that have shaped us.

Through an archeology of emotions, it is also an attempt at finally being able to see a place I know and care for. Not the things they say are beautiful, but the silences and apparent emptiness that beg to be noticed. Photographs need to be transcended; ultimately, their subject must challenge viewers as to why one never considers beauty that only speaks in whispers. Or why the passage of time is a wonderfully privileged thing. Or why shadows and darkness are not necessarily ominous.

This project was shot in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Sao Tomé & Principe, South Africa, Tanzania and Zanzibar, between 2020 and 2025. Soon to be released in a book form by Skeleton Key Press.