None

Franco-Algerian visual artist, photographer and author
Lives and works in France.

Naïla Salmi develops a practice at the intersection of photography, writing and poetry. Her work focuses on the relationships between memory, territory and belonging, through narratives in which intimate experience encounters a broader, collective history.

Her approach is deeply rooted in displacement and in the ways a territory can be experienced, revisited or transmitted. She photographs places, faces and everyday gestures, gathering fragments that bear witness both to the present and to a memory in the making.

In 17 décembre, Chronique d’un automne en Algérie, created following a three-month stay in Algeria, she composes a photographic and poetic narrative around her father’s country. Through encounters, landscapes and scenes of everyday life, she observes Algerian youth while reflecting on her own relationship with an inherited territory.

Writing holds a central place in her practice. Texts and poems accompany her photographs and extend their resonance, allowing other temporalities to emerge between memory, lived experience and transmission.

Her research also unfolds through installation. Some of her photographs are printed on textile, giving the image a material and shifting presence. Fabric becomes at once a medium, a surface and a form of memory — a material traversed by bodies, time and narratives.

Through a practice in which photography and writing continuously respond to one another, Naïla Salmi develops a sensitive body of work around what circulates between individuals, generations and territories. Her works approach memory not as a fixed archive, but as a living material, continually reactivated by those who carry and transmit it.