Abstract
This article takes the form of an interview reconstructed from the notes and memories of the two authors, who participated in the “Bonneville Group”, a group of cooperation practitioners who met informally every year for almost ten years at the turn of the century. The evocation of this experience leads to a discussion of the function and traces of memory work in the world of development aid: both at its heart, which often beats to the rhythm of the activity of donors or major international conferences; and one of the types of intervention spaces – African rural societies – where aid claims to guide development processes, but where development aid interventions are often only episodes among many others in the transformations taking place in the world. This particular form of writing a reconstructed interview is itself a minimal collective device: that of a dialogue, which has also exhumed a fragment of memory, in the sense of as a verbal shaping of the past in the present.