During a three-week stay in Assinie, I immersed myself in the rhythms of coastal life,documenting the labor and exchanges that sustain the fishing community. This seriesemerges from that experience, combining locally sourced newspapers from Côte d’Ivoirewith photographs I captured on site and painted portraits of individuals directly engaged inthe trade.and visibility. The newspapers carry institutional narratives; economic, political, andmediated while the photographs act as fragments of lived observation. The painted figures,rendered in deep tonal contrasts, resist full assimilation into either space, occupying athreshold between presence and erasure.The works examine how labor is both seen and overlooked, physically evident in dailypractice, yet often obscured within broader structures of circulation and value. By mergingdocumentation with abstraction, the series proposes a shifting archive where memory,identity, and environment remain in constant negotiation.
