Opened on July 6 as part of the 2026 edition of Rencontres d’Arles, Mediterranean. Is This Where We Once Lived? brings together Anne Lise Broyer’s long exploration of Mediterranean landscapes and the histories and memories they hold.

Is this where we once lived? The question gives the project both its title and its direction. It reaches across geography and history while also touching something more intimate and elusive, the sense of a past that has disappeared but continues to leave traces in the present. Working in soft shades of grey, Broyer creates images in which reality and imagination constantly overlap. The Mediterranean becomes both a point of observation and a distant horizon, a space shaped by centuries of stories, journeys, myths and loss. Her photographs move between almost abstract seascapes, ancient remains, modern ruins and human faces. From Carthage to Algiers, Beirut, Pompeii and Marseille, Broyer moves through places charged with historical and literary associations. Yet the work follows no fixed geographical route. It unfolds through fragments, pauses and unexpected connections, allowing distant places and different moments in time to occupy the same visual space.

Calm and violence are never far apart. The past surfaces within the present, while real places become inseparable from remembered or imagined ones. The photographs have the tone of an elegy without becoming nostalgic. Rather than looking back towards a lost world, they bring history into the present while allowing it to remain unresolved.

Faces carved in marble appear alongside those of living people. Both seem to belong to the same human story, suspended somewhere between presence and absence, movement and stillness. Grey itself becomes an uncertain element. It might be water, mist, dust, memory or simply the surface of the photograph. It moves through the images like a tide, covering the landscape before withdrawing again.

This rhythm echoes the movement of the sea itself. Just as water reveals and conceals what lies beneath its surface, Broyer’s photographs seem to hold fragments of memory that never remain fixed. They return, disappear and change with every act of looking.

At a time marked by conflict, displacement and political tension, the work asks for a moment of pause. It invites the viewer to step back and look carefully, to occupy a position of attention and vigilance. Broyer finds strength precisely within this uncertainty, where meaning remains open and possibility has not yet disappeared.

To coincide with the exhibition, Éditions Delpire has published the book of the same title, Méditerranée. Est ce là que l’on habitait ? Rather than simply documenting the show, the volume extends the project into a wider reflection on the intimate and political histories of the Mediterranean. Bringing together photographs made in Tunisia, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, Palestine, Greece, Italy, France, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Spain and Israel, the book attempts to make visible what might be described as the Mediterranean wound. Ancient and modern ruins are placed in dialogue with portraits of local residents and migrants, whose stillness and presence recall classical statues. Through these encounters, the Mediterranean emerges as both an archaeological landscape and the setting of an ongoing migratory drama. Here, the ruin is more than a trace of what has been lost. It becomes a point where different moments in history collide, recalling Walter Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image, in which the past comes into contact with the present.

Poems by contemporary writers from each of the countries represented accompany the photographs, introducing other voices and perspectives into the work. The result is not simply a photographic journey, but a collective meditation on a sea shaped by movement, memory, exile and history.