Mille-Feuilles

PHOTOGRAPHY

Dec 15

Mille-Feuilles (A Thousand Layers) is a decade-long photographic project exploring bi-national identity, inherited longing and imagined belonging. Through layered, fragmentary images, it traces memory, migration and placeless desire, questioning how images can become a refuge when home exists only as absence, fiction, and feeling.

Photography Mayssa Jaoudat

Mille-Feuilles is a decade-long photographic project exploring bi-national identity, inherited longing, and imagined belonging through layered, fragmentary images. Bringing together two interrelated chapters, it reflects on identity as a shifting fiction shaped by absence, desire, and the fantasy of a home that never fully existed.

The work originates from a need to reconnect the dispersed threads of a life lived between France, Morocco, and multiple symbolic landscapes that have shaped the artist’s gaze. More than a visual journal, it forms an emotional palimpsest – composed of silences, impressions, and shadows. When the Sun Turns Black evokes the strangeness of daily life and placeless desire, while Suzanne, Long Road examines family memory, migration, and bi-national experience. Together, they question how one can build a visual home when tangible landmarks are missing, and how images can become a refuge or a threshold. Rather than a linear narrative, Mille-Feuilles explores the subtle tensions between how we see, where we come from, and what we feel.

The work originates from a need to reconnect the dispersed threads of a life lived between France, Morocco, and multiple symbolic landscapes.

About Mayssa

Mayssa Jaoudat (b. 1993) is a French-Moroccan photographer and artist whose work engages with identity, memory and belonging. With a cinematic sensibility and a transdisciplinary background, her work reflects the instability of identities formed between multiple places, shaped by the dynamics of dual nationality and repeated displacements.

Her practice unfolds between documentary modes and introspective narrative, exploring how images hold complex and vulnerable forms of experience. Her work seeks to reassemble the fragments of a dispersed memory through intimate traces and ordinary scenes found in places that feel both familiar and strange, opening subtle ruptures within the ambiguity of everyday life.

Mayssa’s work has been shown at FRAC Île-de-France, Fondation Fiminco, Casino Luxembourg, Galerie BS, and CEEAC, and she is currently the 2025 research resident at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce.

To see more of her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram

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Mille-Feuilles (A Thousand Layers) is a decade-long photographic project exploring bi-national identity, inherited longing, and imagined belonging. Through layered, fragmentary images, it traces memory, migration, and placeless desire, questioning how images can become a refuge when home exists only as absence, fiction, and feeling.

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Christian Trippe

Mille-Feuilles

The work originates from a need to reconnect the dispersed threads of a life lived between France, Morocco, and multiple symbolic landscapes.

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