FORUM 056: Maude Grübel. Jardin d’essai

"Jardin d’essai" is a series of photos taken by Maude Grübel in Algiers between 2009 and 2014. The title is a reference to a botanical garden created in the Hamma district in 1832, during French colonization. The Franco-German photographer first visited the Algerian capital in the company of a friend who was returning to his homeland after several years of absence and who sensed that he no longer belonged.

This feeling of alienation forms the thread running through Maude Grübel’s photographic exploration of Algiers which she treats as unknown territory. She sets off in search of her family’s history of migration, through France, Germany, and the Maghreb. Her photographs move between documentary sobriety and poetic imagery. She combines empty streets and squares, parks, and landscapes with uncompromisingly poignant portraits to create an atmospheric snapshot of a city where time has stood still. Her photographs tread a fine line between documentary objectivity and poetic imagery. She explores the surfaces and structures of whitewashed façades, burnt woodlands and urban details in often fragmentary compositions. Maude Grübel explores gaps and voids, circles around the forgotten and the unspoken. The photographer keeps rearranging and juxtaposing her subjective impressions like finds from an excavation, treating the relationship between subjective memory and collective history much like an archeology of the present day.