Reina, Abdelbaki & Me

Profile photo of Anita Pouchard Serra
Anita Pouchard Serra
Visual storyteller and photojournalist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me -
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me -
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me - cheak pees before my first couscous preparation. Buenos Aires, Argentina
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me - Portrait of Reina in France, 2019 and Collage of a photography of Reina, took on her autorization...
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me - 1962 is the end of the war in Algeria, but not the end of violence and massacres. Few days after...
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me - View of a photo archive of my mother dressed as a traditional spanish woman, shot in my Buenos...
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me -
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me - Oran buses in the New Oran, Salta province, Argentina. There is a second city in the world called...
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me - Self portrait with blond hair and a mediteranean light. Marseille, france
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me
cheak pees before my first couscous preparation. Buenos Aires, Argentina
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me
Portrait of Reina in France, 2019 and Collage of a photography of Reina, took on her autorization to leave the country during the last weeks of the war attached to a google image she sent me when she was trying to explain what she saw one day in her street during the war. The sentence in french, the one she sent me with the picture says : It's something like this but covered by newspapers than I saw. October 2019.
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me
1962 is the end of the war in Algeria, but not the end of violence and massacres. Few days after my family left, a massacre happened in their city. I took this picture in a slum in Buenos Aires where I was working. The appearance of this date and bloodstain-like paint stains froze me and are part of these flashbacks I’m working on. Buenos AIres, 2020
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me
View of a photo archive of my mother dressed as a traditional spanish woman, shot in my Buenos Aires’ house. October 2019.
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me
Oran buses in the New Oran, Salta province, Argentina. There is a second city in the world called Oran, created by a spanish colonizator at the end of the 18th. He was born in Oran, Argelia.
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me
Self portrait with blond hair and a mediteranean light. Marseille, france
The project consists of a photographic essay and a short documentary film that intertwines family memories with Algeria's war for its independence from France between 1954 and 1962. In a context between both countries that is still conflictive and tense, the goal is to reflect on colonial pasts and decolonial presents, on complex identities shaped by migrations and to create a space for intercultural dialogue, despite traumas and conflicts.

It’s based on the story of Reina, my Spanish mother, born and raised in Oran, Algeria during the war, and on my story, as her daughter, who emigrated from France to Argentina 12 years ago. I intend to reflect from a temporal and geographical distance on my family story and this part of its history. Reina never returned to Algeria. But Abdelbaki, a man born in Oran after the Independence and whom she met on an online forum about Oran, became her eyes for the last 15 years in her childhood neighborhood. The project is a conversation between three voices that seeks to weave at a distance an individual and collective transnational history and memory.

This ongoing project consists of  a series of photos with a non-linear narrative, where territories and voices dialogue in layers and multiple readings, from archives to new pictures. My visual language is both poetic and political in tone. In addition, I’m working on a short documentary film, started with the scholarship received from the Fred Ritchin program Images based strategies for social change. This video piece will work as an introduction to the questions the project wants to bring to the audience, and help to appreciate the complete body of work and its layers.  

Check the teaser on vimeoThe project received in 2021 the support of the CNAP- National Center for Visual Arts in France and a scholarship for the Screen Arts School program led by Fred Ritchin.
Public Story
Reina, Abdelbaki & Me
Copyright Anita Pouchard Serra 2024
Date of Work Jul 2019 - Ongoing
Updated Sep 2021
Location France
Topics Archives, Colonialism, Family, Identity, Migration, Personal
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Reina, Abdelbaki & Me by Anita Pouchard Serra Reina, Abdelbaki & Me by Anita Pouchard Serra Reina, Abdelbaki & Me by Anita Pouchard Serra
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