Three suitcases, three stories, three individual histories that interweave threads of our collective History. 

Through this seemingly ordinary, even insignificant object, Kader Attia tells the story both of his family and of the anonymous actors in the struggle for Algerian independence; the thousands of nameless heroes, men and women of courage and commitment who worked in the shadows against colonialism. Whether it’s a suitcase “left behind” in the late 1950s by an unknown member of the Algerian resistance at the home of the artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, a suitcase found by chance in a Parisian street by Françoise Vergès containing photographs of her family, or the suitcase that accompanied the artist’s father on his journeys back and forth between France and Algeria, each one contains traces of a life, interwoven with a collective unconscious in which our individual dreams as passers-by are played out.