In my essay for Périphérique (Loose Joints, 2021), I built my thinking around time: the moment the work was made; what it meant in the early 2000s; what it meant to me whilst writing; and what it continues to reveal now. This series refuses the dominant visual language of the banlieues — a language of crisis, criminality, and distance. Bourouissa turns that lens inside out. He doesn’t ask for permission to center the people and places often relegated to the margins — he just does it, with precision, care, and sharp formal intelligence. Every image is staged not to manipulate, but to authentically restore pride. The young men here aren’t symbols or statistics. They’re not performing for the press or the police — they’re holding their ground.  

Périphérique because it captures the tension between representation and reality, between surveillance and self-definition. Rooted in post-2005 France, yet it speaks far beyond it—to questions of race, class, architecture, and the quiet brutality of exclusion. But this isn’t a story of defeat. There is confrontation, but also resistance, presence and style. Bourouissa builds a visual language that insists we pay attention. That’s why Périphérique endures: because it complicates. Because it confronts. Because it reminds us the periphery is not outside the center — it is the pulse of it all. 

TAOUS R. DAHMANI is a London-based French, British, and Algerian art historian specialising in photography. She has curated both group and solo exhibitions internationally, including the 2022 Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles (France) and the 2024 Jaou Photo Biennale in Tunis (Tunisia). Her solo curatorial projects include SMITH at NOUA (Bodø, Norway), Anastasia Samoylova at the Saatchi Gallery (London, UK), and Adam Rouhana at Kyotographie (Kyoto, Japan).

Dahmani’s writing has been widely published in photobooks and journals, with contributions to titles by Phaidon, Loose Joints, Textuel, and Tate Publishing, as well as features in Aperture, FOAM, Camera Austria, The British Journal of Photography, Dazed, GQ, and 1000 Words Magazine. She is the associate editor of Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain (MACK/Autograph ABP, 2024), a critically acclaimed, award-winning publication. She also teaches at London College of Communication (UAL) as an Associate Lecturer.