Near Briançon, in the forests of the French Hautes-Alpes, a self-managed shelter called Chez Marcel has given refuge to people who arrived there after long and uncertain journeys. Florence Cuschieri photographed them, and the land around them, over the course of a project that became her first book. The paths worn into the ground by walking circle back on themselves; so does the flight of swallows. The mountain, the firs, the snow: these are not backdrops but vessels, holding bodies that have reason to stay hidden even as the camera insists on their presence. Cuschieri’s Franco-Maltese background and her interest in memory, forgetting and exile shape the work, which moves between documentary observation and a slower, more poetic register in which waiting is itself a subject.
Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi edited and sequenced the book and designed it with Perrine Serre. That collaboration matters: the ordering of the photographs is what turns a body of landscape work into a narrative about circulation and return. Chose Commune publishes La Ronde des hirondelles in French, English and Arabic, three languages that reflect both the book’s European context and the origins of many of the people it depicts. The section-sewn softcover, with its open spine, is a binding that lets the pages lie flat without hiding the structure that holds them together. Eighty-two plates are distributed across 172 pages at 23.5 by 30 centimetres. The book appeared in 2025 and was preceded by the LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award at Arles in 2024, a recognition of the project in its unpublished form; part of the proceeds from sales is directed to Chez Marcel.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies less in novelty than in method. Cuschieri is a photographer whose work has circulated through European festivals and magazines, and this is her first monograph, which gives the sequencing a particular weight. The decision to publish in Arabic as well as French and English is not decorative; it belongs to the argument the book is making about who is permitted to appear and in what language they are addressed. A book that treats landscape as a record of movement, and movement as a form of endurance, repays the kind of attention collectors give to photographs that are also arguments.
