Bourse du Talent 2026 : Fiona Forte

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Return to Tlemcen is a long-term artistic project combining photography, writing, archives, and material experimentation. In 2024, after thirty-one years of secrecy, I learned that I had been conceived through rape. DNA testing led me to Tlemcen, the city from which my biological father’s family originates, and which has since become the starting point for an investigation into fragmented inheritances and invisible memories.

The body of work presented here brings together images drawn from my photographic and written archives, produced before this revelation, alongside the first research developed in its aftermath. Revisiting these photographs, I sought to move them away from their original documentary function in order to reveal a more symbolic and affective reading—one capable of approaching what resists direct narration.

This work constitutes an initial mapping of the project, which I intend to extend through a research journey to Algeria and the production of new images placed in dialogue with family archives, oral histories, and the landscapes encountered along the way. Through different media and image-making strategies, the project examines processes of silencing, the limits of documentary representation, and the forms of transmission that circulate beyond official narratives. Rather than reconstructing a definitive truth, it seeks to make perceptible what remains fragmented, unspoken, or impossible to name.

“This is also why fiction, as much as research, is necessary, because it is all that remains to fill the silences passed down between the frames from one generation to the next.”
The Art of Losing — Alice Zeniter

Fiona Forte is a visual artist and documentary photographer born in Vitry-sur-Seine, France. She lives and works in Marseille.
Self-taught, she has been developing a long-term photographic practice since 2019, situated at the intersection of documentary image-making, writing, and installation. Her projects explore fragmented forms of storytelling in which intimate experiences and collective contexts intersect through associations of images, texts, and archives.
Informed by feminist and decolonial approaches, her research focuses on marginalized narratives and the displacement of representational frameworks in order to examine mechanisms of memory, transmission, and silence.
She conceives her projects as relational spaces, where meaning circulates without becoming fixed, and where the image becomes a tool for inhabiting uncertainty.
Her work has been presented in France and internationally, including exhibitions and presentations in Marseille, Paris, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, and Guadeloupe.