Summary

While the living find in the mountain indecipherable fragments of our former humanity, some absent in the plain seem to have left behind them remains that we no longer even know how to read and decipher. Thus the sense of the presence and disappearance of foreigners gradually emerges within this small territory, where they have constituted – Spaniards, Harkis, Poles – the most advantageous and most exploited workforce. To trace their presence buried in the post-industrial landscapes of this region is to find a memory of places and beings, and by this emergence of another history, to act of resistance. The practice of archaeology observed in parallel to this quest, allows to open a reflection on history as a materiality as well as on the part of opacity and lack that is at the heart of our otherness.