Working across photography, video, sculpture, drawing and installation, Kader Attia explores the aesthetic and ethical fallout of colonialism. His photographic series Rochers Carrés [Square Rocks], composed of nine C-prints, captures the massive concrete blocks lining the shoreline of Bab El Oued, his childhood neighbourhood in Algiers. Originally installed as coastal defences, these blocks mark physical and symbolic boundaries: between land and sea, Africa and Europe, home and elsewhere. Over time, Algerian youth have reclaimed these rocks as a place to socialise, and some even dream of migration across the Mediterranean. These nondescript rocks, resembling coastal barriers in other parts of the world, blur geographic specificity, prompting a broader reflection on displacement, aspiration and shared postcolonial conditions. In Attia’s images, these rocks redefine the border as a site of belonging and agency, acting as thresholds of connection, resistance and redefinition.