Stora
Stora tells the story of a family across three generations and three territories.
At the end of the 19th century, the Scotto di Vettimo family—sardine fishermen from an island near Naples—fled poverty in the Italian kingdom and settled in Stora, in French Algeria.
One generation later, in 1962, my grandfather Robert had to flee in turn, hastily abandoning his house, the village, and the family fish cannery. Algeria had just gained independence. Like hundreds of thousands of other pieds-noirs, the family crossed the sea to Marseille, discovering an unfamiliar France. My mother, barely nine years old, did not yet know she would never see Algeria again.
In 2022, as my mother was suffering from an incurable cancer, I was invited to photograph a wedding in Algeria. A unique opportunity presented itself: to return there for her, before she passed.
The prospect terrified me. It carried an unspeakable weight that had hovered over my family since my childhood: I would be the first to retrace this journey in sixty years and to see again the ghost village that haunted every family meal and lived on in the stories we told.
I went. I walked the streets of Stora, met its residents and fishermen, listened to their memories of the past, and photographed today’s Algeria.
Then I traveled to Italy to try to understand what they had left behind there, and finally to the south of France to glimpse what they had carried with them from those exiles.
I sense that in transgenerational stories there is a constant search for correspondence—a need to make sense of lived experience through the meticulous weaving of connections, as if our true identity stubbornly transcended the territories crossed from one generation to the next.
As if only sensations remained: the cédrats and volcanic sands of Procida, the prickly pears and nighttime walks along the port of Stora, the sea urchins of Carry-le-Rouet.
Places blend together, memories overlap—but always, at the center, the Mediterranean.
“Wild life surfaced by itself at the end of every street.
There were monkey ravines and lion ravines beyond count.
The air, the sky, the streets, the houses, the people all bore strange names.
The territory had not yet been entirely mapped—mapped in French, mapped in French words.
The sense of being there, and not elsewhere, also came from this invisible presence of the wild world, not yet destroyed, and of untamed nature, not yet domesticated. This was one of the many reasons why Algeria was not France.”
— Jean-Louis Comolli, Une terrasse en Algérie
This project was made possible with the support of the CNAP.
