Dry by Abdo Shanan is a book that discusses the influence of social environment on individual’s identity. Taking the Algerian social environment as a common factor between all the people I have met during the development of this project. A society that still bear the weight and trauma of a violent history.

Dry is available to pre-order. The book will go to print in the end of February and will be ready to be shipped by May 2022.

Dry also is a personal story:

I was born in Algeria to an Algerian mother and a Sudanese father. When I was nine, my family moved to Libya, where I then spent 18 years of my life convincing myself I was Algerian, while my father kept insisting I was Sudanese. At the age of 28, I decided to make Algeria my home, and it was only then that I began questioning my idea of belonging.

I felt like an island in the middle of a society with which I didn’t have as much in common as I thought I did. How is it possible for an island to exist in the middle of an ocean? Is it because the island’s dry soil is strong enough to impose itself against the water surrounding it, or is the ocean merely tolerating the presence and existence of the island? Or is it a relationship of compromise in which both sides renounce part of their claim to the other in order to co-exist?

With “Dry” I want you to doubt everything you’ve been told about national identity and what it means to “belong”. For what do these social constructs mean anyway?