Rzuga

Rzuga left for Syria in 2013 and vanished, silenced by Tunisia’s anti-terror laws. The project reflects on his silent return, forgiveness, and shared childhood, exploring pain, memory, and the fragile possibility of listening.

Rzuga is Amina’s twin brother, my cousin since the dawn of time. Amina still lives with us, but Rzuga was swallowed by the wolf.

It’s an tunisian expression used for those who go to the front to fight and never come back.

In 2013 he left for Syria. He was twenty years old. From that moment on, he disappeared. No phone calls. No news of him. And above all: no possibility of searching for him. In Tunisia, the anti-terrorism law punishes even the relatives of those who decide to leave to fight. Even asking for news about him would have been dangerous. For more than ten years, he was an absence. A whispered name, a hidden photograph, a ghost among the living — a burden that could not be shared.

Then, in December 2024, I was in Syria documenting the fall of the Assad regime. News of my presence there reached him too. One day I received a phone call: it was Rzuga. He asked only one thing — to speak with his parents. But to protect them, and avoid any traceable communication, I promised I would photograph them and bring back news to him.

A silent exchange, the only possible one.

The Rzuga project is not only the portrait of a cousin lost and found, nor merely a political reflection on terrorism. It also seeks to be a meditation on forgiveness, on the desire to understand the unforgivable. It is an attempt to say that, even when the pain is immense, even when an entire community, an entire family has been betrayed, there still remains a fragile space for listening.

It is also a melancholic farewell to childhood — to those summers in our grandfather’s room, with my sisters and cousins, when we shared the stories of our lives. The story of who we were, before the world pulled us apart. The friendships born in those years carry a unique intensity: they testify to who we were, when we could still become anything.

I know who Rzuga was, when he could still become anything.