This first biographical monograph by Lebanese photographer Randa Mirza brings together several photographic works begun in the early 2000s and spans two decades.

And yet, on the scale of this small country, we’re talking about massive immigration. All immigrants are unique, but what they have in common is their attachment to a territory, and very often the wounds associated with what they have to leave behind. One day, a country can be the one that welcomes you, then decades later the one you have to leave for various reasons, and vice versa. Being aware of this helps us to empathize more with those who flee their countries.

Aïnata was initially a two-handed film project made between late 2011 and early 2012, and is part of a history of occupation, resistance, war and transnational struggles that continue to generate untapped memories. It’s not a question of making a book about the film, but of extending the very space of the film to the book. Like a rhizome, the aim is to map within the book the different strata – visual and textual – that make up the body of Aïnata, to give an account of the multiplicity of forms of memory and discourse of and on History.