Date 2015 Height (cm) 13 Length (cm) 20,5 Depth (cm) 14,5 Weight (g) 250 Materials and Techniques wood, paper and polystyrene. Subject/Description The notebook is carved out and metaphorically transformed into a suitcase, which contains the buildings and the trees in its turn. Three small buildings, with a myriad of tiny windows, side by side, all the same. This case may belong to a migrant or a person who lives in his country, his city of origin. The buildings resemble those in any city, any suburb. They can be part of the memory of a person of French origin born in Paris and a person of Cameroonian origin born in the same city. If the places are part of everyone's memory, becoming part of the personal, then the question arises: who is the stranger?

From this need to speak to all comes the choice not to represent any particular city, but a reality that can be recognized as their own, or similar to their own, by any inhabitant of a western metropolis. The main inspiration, however, comes from a concrete reference, that of the barres de logements, which could be translated as "stick houses", or the big housing solutions of the Parisian suburbs. They are the symbol of the hypertrophic development of cities. Suffocating construction crammed houses and modules that are repeated without variation: all manifestations of uncontrolled urbanization, which does not consider the needs of those going to live there.
The barres respond to the big problem of overpopulation that followed industrial development, especially from the sixties onwards.
(Readjusted and abstracted from the article of Bianca Trevisan on Doppiozero: Maurice Pefura: Who is the stranger?) Archival Fund AtWork Archive number XX_FF_321 Exhibitions Detour 2.0 New York, See the world through creativity, One World Observatory, May 2022
Personal data Paris, 1967. Artist