What Remains? Traces of Culture and Belonging

Artist: Médine Tidou
Curator: Jeanne Nzakizabandi

The exhibition “What Remains? – Traces of Culture and Belonging” brings together several bodies of work by photographer Médine Tidou that explore the complex relationships between cultural identity, place, history, and belonging. Through portraiture, artifacts, and spatial staging, the images investigate how individuals carry, practice, and continually reinterpret culture across different contexts. Médine Tidou’s work focuses particularly on West African societies as well as the Afro-diaspora in Europe.

In these photographs, culture does not appear as something static. Rather, it exists in a constant process of transformation—moving across borders and generations. The cultures of marginalized groups in particular, which have repeatedly faced attempts of erasure for various reasons, continue to manifest themselves in language, textiles, architecture, food, and many other expressions of everyday life.

Médine Tidou directs her camera toward places and situations shaped by colonial power relations. Some of the selected works depict colonial
buildings—architectural structures that were not originally built for the people who inhabit them today. Yet in each image, the portrayed subjects reclaim these spaces and reshape them through their presence. They express a lived culture that reoccupies these sites and shifts their meanings. Their presence invites viewers to reinterpret these formerly violent spaces.

At Berlin Global Village, a place where numerous migrant and diasporic organizations come together and where questions of global justice are actively discussed, these works resonate in a particularly meaningful way. However, the exhibition does not offer simple answers. Instead, it opens a space to reflect on what we carry with us, what we inherit, what we choose, what disappears—and what remains.