My grandparents' house is a renovated old farm. The stairs, the structure, the doors are made of wood, the walls are made of big cold stones. To get to the cupboard, you need to go up a dozen of stairs, along a corridor, up another two steps, open a door on your left and squeeze between a small side table and a sofa to reach the door of the cupboard. It is a human-size wooden cupboard, deep enough to put large boxes in it. Inside the cupboard, you can smell the dust mixed with dry wood, there is no lock, you just need to push down on a piece of wood that prevents the door from swinging open. Everything inside is very organised; photo albums, notebooks ordered by dates, booklets with different colours. On the right of the middle shelf are two boxes containing old slides and glass-sheet negative photographs with labels inscribed with a curly handwriting. They are dusty, with some scratches, some of them have shades of blue, others are more brown-orange. I can see the images properly when I hold them up to the window facing the West. I gather sixty of them taken in French occupied Algeria in the 1920s, maps and scans of drawings of maps, amassing awkward questions about my family's colonial heritage.
de(s)order
deremember
destructure