Abstract
In 2016, the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille hosted the ‘Made in Algeria: Généalogie d’un territoire’ exhibition which gathered cartographic depictions of Algeria from the earliest European encounters to modern images of an independent culture still bearing colonial remnants. The contemporary pieces, notably by Franco-Algerian artists Zineb Sedira and Katia Kameli, expose multiple layers of the past as they reformulate what had been erased by colonisation and what had been silenced by the subsequent ruptures of independence. Their images, like the artists who have migrated back and forth between Algeria and France across time, show accumulated layers of colonial memory enmeshed in contemporary images of the Algerian people and landscape. By assessing the marks still visibly mapped onto Algeria in the exhibition, this article explores how what is ‘Made in Algeria’ remains heavily marked by France.
From January to May 2016, the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MuCEM) in Marseille hosted an exhibition called ‘Made in Algeria: Généalogie d’un territoire’. The exhibition was proclaimed to be the first large-scale exposition on the Algerian ‘territory’ (MuCEM, 2016b) and gathered cartographic depictions of Algeria from the earliest European encounters in the fifteenth century, the erasure of pre-existing structures in the nineteenth century, and modern images of an independent culture still bearing colonial remnants in the early twenty-first century, with a goal of showing ‘ce long et singulier processus qu’a été l’impossible conquête de l’Algérie’ (MuCEM, 2016a: 3). These contemporary pieces, notably by video artists Zineb Sedira, who was born to Algerian parents in France, and Katia Kameli, who has a French mother and an Algerian father, expose multiple layers of the past as they reformulate what had been erased by colonisation and what had been silenced by the subsequent ruptures of independence. Their images, like the artists who have migrated back and forth between Algeria and France across time, show temporal markings through the accumulated layers of colonial memory enmeshed in contemporary images of the Algerian people and landscape. By assessing the lines, grids and other marks that are still visibly mapped onto Algeria in the exhibition, this article explores how what is ‘Made in Algeria’ remains heavily marked by France. The representation of this art exhibition in its print and online material projects yet another image of the former colony continually migrating outwards from Algeria long after the exhibition in Marseille has closed.
While the title ‘Made in Algeria’, which is abbreviated in the related web material to ‘MIA’, is about Algeria, the exhibition has been assembled in France for a French audience, and most of the artwork is inspired by the French imagination of Algeria. The project was curated by author and art historian Zahia Rahmani and historian Jean-Yves Sarazin, who directs the maps collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Rahmani immigrated to France from Algeria as a small child and has published literature based on her experience and her father’s role as a harki in the Algerian War.
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The Made in Algeria exhibition was conceived as une exposition dédiée à la représentation d’un pays et de sa terre. Une tentative de mise à plat d’une aventure moderne qui a commencé il y a plus de deux siècles et dont les effets durent jusqu’à aujourd’hui: la fabrique coloniale d’un territoire. (MuCEM, 2016a: 3)
This ‘tentative de mise à plat’ – which simultaneously elicits close examination and flattens its object of study – is both striking and disturbing in the catalogue pages. Rahmani and Sarazin explain, ‘Nous avons toujours su que le colonialisme était lié à l’appropriation de la terre, à son occupation. Les représentations nées de cette histoire ne servaient qu’à justifier la captation’ (MuCEM, 2016a: 6). The colony was scrutinised, meticulously mapped, documented and illustrated for the French Empire, and this methodical dissection was essential to its successful conquest. Algeria had to be charted and exported back to France as an accessible and knowable image of its overseas empire. Cartography and painting in their limited and changing ways were the primary tools used to make the far away seem present and real. The exhibition, without overtly stating it, shows aesthetically beautiful representations of Algeria, but it also disturbs in its methodical precision, which increased over time as Algeria increasingly became part of France. Rahmani and Sarazin point out, ‘Sans cette cartographie [coloniale], il n’y a pas de conquête’ (MuCEM, 2016a: 6).
Because Algeria is the largest country in Africa, for decades ‘d’immenses étendues ont été des espaces de projection idéalisés pour toutes les enfances françaises’ (2016a: 7). It also served as a ‘laboratoire majeur’ for new architectural and scientific innovation, as France erased Algerian history on site and rebuilt from the ground up (2016a: 6). Then, after the war for independence (1954 to 1962), ‘cela a brutalement cessé … Rapidement tout s’est réduit’ (2016a: 7). Silence and absence marked the period after Algerian independence as the two countries attempted to cope without each other. As the Algerian historian Daho Djerbal states, ‘la question a été, et est toujours, comment faire pour (re)donner un nom à ce dont on a été dépossédé et que l’on retrouve en soi et pour soi’ (quoted in Forster, 2016). This dispossession was sustained through Algeria’s civil war of the 1990s which is not overtly represented in the exhibition. Instead, subtle links appear between present-day Algeria and the French colonial past and even times preceding the French. Rahmani and Sarazin explain that contemporary artists examine the boundary lines to upend them and ‘nous faire penser à un avant de leur existence, à une autre surface oubliée ou à de nouvelles modalités de l’espace géographique’ (MuCEM, 2016a: 6).
It is specifically this examination of upended boundaries that video artists Sedira and Kameli are able to achieve through their use of layered imagery of past and present Algeria. Unlike the numerous nostalgic photo-documentary works produced between the 1980s and today by the Pieds-Noirs, the former French citizens of Algeria, video allows access to multiple temporal spaces at once. In ‘Accumulating Algeria: recurrent images in Pied-Noir visual works’ (Hubbell, 2015a), I examine how specific sites in Algeria become iconic as similar images of colonial constructions and even Roman ruins in Algeria are repeated across multiple photo texts: As these accumulated images represent an entire community’s long absent home, and as many members contribute to the composite image of colonial Algeria, a process of layering and overlapping occurs. The representations of places become densely piled, heavy with consolidated meaning and multiple memories of places to such an extent that the image becomes larger than life. (Hubbell, 2015a: 209)
Across these texts, a certain recognisable version of Algeria emerges, even to the uninitiated viewer. For example, Constantine is reduced to its suspension bridges and Oran is recognised by the Fort de Santa Cruz and the Notre Dame Chapel below it. Algiers is distilled into its port, the Grande Poste and exotic images of the Casbah. In these photo-documentary works: The pieds-noirs effectively attempt to materialise what no longer exists, and as such, their writing becomes a ruin – a marker of what used to be, hoping to prompt recognition. In their efforts to fill an immeasurable void, many pieds-noirs are caught in a cycle of repeatedly re-creating the homeland while clinging to fragments of their past. (Hubbell, 2011a: 150)
This nostalgic fixed image of the past is not the goal of the ‘Made in Algeria’ exhibition, and Siegfried Forster confirms in his article on the exhibition for Radio France Internationale that ‘le but n’est pas de montrer “les bienfaits de la colonisation” comme jadis proposés dans la très controversée loi de 2005’ (Forster, 2016). In contrast to Pied-Noir visual texts, ‘Made in Algeria’ does not focus on iconic French architecture, French engineering feats or sites of Roman ruins which show a common European ancestry. 2 The exhibition also attempts to veer away from the negative depictions of Algeria in France today that, according to Rahmani, are widespread: ‘il est rare de lire un article sur l’Algérie qui ne soit pas négatif’ (MuCEM, 2016a: 11). Rahmani strives to show Algeria in a different light, allowing academics and artists to ‘faire venir à la surface une autre connaissance, une autre vérité de l’histoire qui, là-bas, a été la nôtre’ (2016a: 11).
Video is one way to display this different truth of Algeria’s history. While the photo reduces the visual scope of these locations, video has the power to undo the fixedness of the image and to display the ruin for what it is. As I explored in ‘(Re)turning to ruins: Pied-Noir visual returns to Algeria’ (Hubbell, 2011a), when revisiting sites, one may be taken back in time and view one’s past experience transposed over the location, but when re-viewing on the screen, the confrontation between physical space and memory becomes apparent (Hubbell, 2011a: 148). The video allows the person holding the camera to become a spectator and see things that were not observed on location. These filmed returns are especially able to ‘demonstrate the tenacity of the past and the fragmentation that occurs when the homeland is revisited’ (Hubbell, 2015b: 173). The ‘Made in Algeria’ catalogue contains two images of Roman rubble: ‘Fragments trouvés dans les fouilles’ from the Cherchell Museum and one screenshot from a 1987 video by Ahmed Zir called ‘Repères’ which shows Corinthian columns but no identifiable location or identifiable structure of which they are a part (MuCEM, 2016a: 22–3). The ruins, physical reminders of absence, are jumbled, deconstructed and unable to tell a coherent narrative as occurs in many Pied-Noir photo books.
Algeria, far away and close up
Through its chronological exploration of maps and cartography, ‘Made in Algeria’ shows how Algeria has been seen from both far away and close up across time. 3 Although I am primarily interested in how the most recent works in the exhibition (‘Au plus près’, close-ups of Algeria post 1962) function in relation to memory, it is worth noting how the earlier sections frame this discussion. ‘Made in Algeria’ both begins and ends with maps. As explained by Forster, ‘En montrant des cartes et des images, Made in Algeria nous interroge: comment les deux côtés peuvent-ils surmonter les tracés de la colonisation?’ (Forster, 2016). Overcoming the traces (and paths) of colonisation – for both the Algerians and the French – is perhaps not possible. The boundaries that were drawn in the conquest did not disappear when the colonial power was cast off. In one of the exhibition’s promotional videos ‘Made in Algeria : Exposition au MuCem’, the museum’s general director Catherine Sentis states that the traces of French occupation remain and ‘les blessures ne sont pas toutes refermées’ (Canalnaf Télévision, 2016). The wounds are apparent in the artwork and among the exiles (both French and Algerian) who were forced to leave their homeland.
While the ‘Made in Algeria’ exhibition sometimes highlights the Algerian landscape in romantic and realist ways, it also shows the land scarred by layers of measurements cast over it. From the beginning of the catalogue, illustrated maps define the boundaries of Africa, and wild imagination sometimes fills the terrain. French explorer and cartographer Guillaume Le Testu maps the Mediterranean and Africa in 1556. The illuminated manuscript depicts, among other things, a naked man running from a wild beast and more fantastical animals than humans wandering the continent. Overlaying the mythical kingdoms, charted lines emanate in star-like patterns from various key locations and crisscross the mapped terrain. This overlay will come back in the contemporary art to be discussed below. It is part of what geographer Thomas J. Bassett calls, ‘The mapmaker’s graphic language of color, cartouches, vignettes, boundaries, and blank spaces’ which are a part of empire-building and ‘advanced territorial expansion’ (1994: 316). The early sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps are far from what we now consider to be accurate and are often based on the cartographer’s imagination of the unknown spaces they chart. Le Testu’s depiction is followed by a map from 1620 zooming in on Algiers with a British flotilla at the port ‘afin de détruire les galères et galiotes barbaresques qui sèment le désordre’ (MuCEM, 2016a: 15). Algiers is both magnified (sources of water are clearly depicted) and reduced (the city interior is nothing more than lines and colours), yet the advancing British flotilla is highly detailed. The known contrasts with the unknown like the strategic and irrelevant sites.
Across the exhibition, Algeria is progressively charted and dissected with encyclopaedic entries on the flora, as illustrated in ‘Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie’ (1868), and orientalist art such as Horace Vernet’s depiction of the capture of Bône in 1832. Vernet’s 1835 painting takes the Arab’s perspective, high up and towering over the ultimately successful French troops. The caption reads, ‘L’action vive des soldats de l’armée d’Afrique, l’inaction fataliste des Arabes’ (MuCEM, 2016a: 18). 4 The art catalogue visually (and textually) examines the progressive conquest, Algeria laid bare to Europe, its secrets unfolded and displayed. Although the subject matter is aesthetically pleasing, the agglomerate image of Algeria in the catalogue feels indecent and exposed. France visibly invaded and possessed the country through its charting; yet even more than 50 years after independence, these visions linger.
In Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen explains that ‘representations of the visible will always show residues and traces of the invisible’ (Huyssen, 2003: 10). As Algeria is laid bare in the catalogue, erasures and superimpositions are simultaneously highlighted. During the conquest and throughout the colonial years, markers of Algerian history were erased: De nombreux architectes ont exercé leur talent en Algérie – certains allant jusqu’à projeter l’éradication généralisée de l’habitat existant … On rase, on détruit, on recouvre, tout en laissant quelques traces du passé et l’on tente une aventure architecturale incroyablement trompeuse, mais d’une efficacité et d’une séduction redoutables. (MuCEM, 2016a: 7)
Though not explored in the catalogue, after independence markers of the French also began disappearing (for example, changing place names from French heroes to Algerian icons). Contemporary art offers the possibility of reconstituting varied moments and unifying spatio-temporal distances into single works. This is largely accomplished through layers which embody ‘border-crossing memory’ (Huyssen, 2003: 12).
Zineb Sedira
Though MuCEM commissioned several contemporary artists for the ‘Made in Algeria’ show, I will focus on two Franco-Algerian women, Zineb Sedira and Katia Kameli, who produce video art. Sedira has long used her photography and video installations to depict the transmission of Algerian memory across generations, and specifically how her parents’ story has been passed on to her. The artist grew up ‘entre deux cultures, deux langues, deux histoires’ (Crenn, 2010), and while born in France, she has been living in London since 1986 (Algeriades.com, 2017). Sedira uses her art to rejoin the two countries that are irreparably wounded by their history and to reconnect with her own family’s past.
Critic Julie Crenn states, ‘Sedira procède à des allers retours dans ce vaste patrimoine qui est le sien. En exil, l’artiste se cherche’ (2010). 5 Sedira writes that she was placed ‘in between’ two often conflicting cultures and politics. These differing maps have led me to explore and question some of the traditional Islamic images/icons and rituals that I grew up with by reinterpreting them through my art practice’ (Lloyd, 1999: 213). In her previous study of the veil, Sedira shows ‘negotiations that take place when we try to expose our multi-layered consciousness. In this way, the visible and invisible topology of the veil is explored through its paradoxes, ambiguities and symbolic significance’ (Lloyd, 1999: 213). Her videos similarly highlight visible and invisible boundaries.
In the ‘Made in Algeria’ catalogue, Sedira’s video stills from her 2005 film And the Road Goes On underscore this multi-layered consciousness (MuCEM, 2016a: 27). As Dimitris Dalakoglou and Penny Harvey explain in ‘Roads and anthropology: ethnographic perspectives on space, time and (im)mobility’, roads ‘elicit powerful temporal imaginaries, holding out the promise (or threat) of future connectivity, while also articulating the political and material histories that often render these otherwise mundane spaces so controversial’ (2012: 460). By filming a road movie along an important path taken during the conquest of Algeria, Sedira highlights these ‘temporal imaginaries’. And the Road Goes On is not unlike the numerous nostalgic filmed returns to Algeria published by colonial exiles from the 1980s onwards, in that Sedira captures scenes from the open window of a moving vehicle. While in Pied-Noir return movies the car windows provide a neat protective separation from the outside world, 6 in Sedira’s work the window is not visible. However, the vehicle’s shadow on the landscape is apparent so that the artist’s presence appears to be moving over the object being filmed without directly reflecting back at her as a side mirror or windscreen might. In the four video stills in the catalogue, Algeria is the backdrop but the focal point is blurred, overlapped, truncated or faded. The humans, while central to the piece, are simultaneously obscured. 7 Sedira explains that this is the result of slow-motion filming techniques. Each time she encountered a person, the film slowed down, causing the landscape to appear ‘en animation constante et rapide’ while the humans do not move, creating ‘formes-fantomes’, contrary to what we typically see – a still landscape with humans moving across it (Sedira, 2016b). Her technique creates visible traces of her car and the passers-by on Algeria. For example, the image of a walking man is fully blurred by multiple exposures. His ghostly appearance seems to have him moving in two directions at once, backed by sea and red earth saturated with colour. The solitary and impassive man in the fourth frame is likewise guarded by two ghostly likenesses of himself as he stares back at the camera, arms crossed in resistance. Sedira is moving in the landscape but separated, seeing and not seeing at once as her camera creates the image. Commenting on her earlier work, Sedira states that ‘there are always further layers of wall and veil. Repetition pushes forward a sense of ambiguity, a continual personal repositioning that plays with clarity and the unclear; between existence and disappearance, taking everything further’ (Lloyd, 1999: 218). This temporal ambiguity is clearly translated in the stills.
Because of the immovable nature of the catalogue and to some extent the website for the exhibition, the videos And the Road Goes On and Les Terres de mon père are transcribed into stills and both movement and time are compressed into a single frame. In Les Terres (2016b) Sedira films her ancestral land in the Aurès mountains to reconstruct ‘l’histoire mouvementée des terres dites de la tribu des Hachem, très impliquée dans le conflit contre le régime civil de 1871 et qui connut une longue série de séquestres, spoliations, procès et restitutions’ (MuCEM, 2016a: 213). In Sedira’s preparatory work for Les Terres, the landscape is obscured by a superimposed grid. The grid is numbered and has faint lines drawn along the landscape, but everything within the grid is muted. The vibrant landscape we see in the film is lost. At the same time, however, some of the grid-marks barely shine through the maze of dirt and grass clumps in the underlying photograph. While the artist projects her methodical control over the landscape to make it express the multi-layered possession of the land, her lines are also lost and faded, sometimes becoming a part of the backdrop.
Sedira has made her video work Les Terres de mon père available online, and unlike her preparatory grid, the landscape is stunningly clear and vibrant (Sedira, 2016b). Les Terres de mon père Part 1 intermingles map and land (‘Les Fermes des Hachem’) to show both Sedira and her father walking through the Algerian landscape. As Sedira walks purposefully across the land, she rhythmically and assertively counts her paces in French. A red boundary line is drawn in the opposite direction as she walks, marking a dark wound in the rocks on the property line. Sheep bleat. Pages turn. Registers are examined. Fields are worked. Her father appears walking along the map entitled ‘Algérie, Département de Constantine’. The dissecting red line slithers. By layering the old canvas map over the moving contemporary image, and by superimposing the fictional boundary across her filmed experience in Algeria, Sedira demonstrates the cleavage created by the French imagination – its attempt to divide, distribute and direct the colony – which remains superimposed on the land. Geographical boundaries, though now invisible, remain inscribed on Algeria.
In Part 2, Sedira films her father walking the landscape amid ruins, rubble and waste: the remnants of what was previously his, as well as contemporary plastic detritus floating about the landscape, remind the viewer of what has been erased in Algeria. Her father silently ponders the terrain, gathers a bunch of greens from the now overgrown and undefined garden, and walks with his cane through an abandoned doorway that does not seem to lead anywhere. We hear his laboured breathing and the tap of his cane on the ground as he walks, and Sedira films his feet on the rocks as he ascends to what used to be a family home. His feet instinctively lead him to abandoned rock structures crumbling into the landscape and along a dizzying path. A donkey grazes inside one of the exposed rooms. Sedira’s father identifies his family land and his parents’ tombs, but bits of plastic trash are strewn about and with time entangled in the old pale stones. The close-ups are striking. Amplified plants are juxtaposed with bits of blue and red waste, leaving the viewer to wonder how the refuse arrived in such a seemingly abandoned location where it is enmeshed, incongruous but inseparable. 8 Sedira’s father declares that the whole farm is destroyed as he navigates an unseen path and nostalgically recounts memories in French of how well he lived there. Yet the viewer sees that this once happy place is not what it was.
As Anna Rocca points out, Sedira’s art progresses ‘from an exploration of memory as self-reflexivity to a representation of memory as guardianship, since past and present, individual and collective, experienced, witnessed or recorded emotions are embedded in her artistic representations of memory’ (2015: 106). Les Terres de mon père falls in between these two types of memory: though it is intensely personal, Sedira also captures her father’s story and inscribes it onto Algeria itself.
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Through her powerful exploration of memory and how it is overlain and enmeshed into place, Sedira shows a beautiful Algerian landscape that has been evacuated of its coloniser, but also of its Algerian inhabitants. Fran Lloyd explains in Contemporary Arab Women’s Art: The mapping of the artists’ geographies and histories is particularly complex given that the territorial boundaries of nations have been subject to change through colonisation and postcolonial wars and occupations … The issue is further complicated because [the artists] have moved from their country of birth for numerous economic, political or professional reasons. Such displacement, whether imposed or voluntary, makes for a multilayered mapping where the artist and the work is multi-sited and complex relations exist between the place of origin and the present country or countries of the diaspora. (Lloyd, 1999: 28)
Sedira’s Algeria is vast and stunning but filled with remnants of civilisations that, untethered from their purpose, now migrate at will (or at least at the whim of the wind). The plastic bits enmeshed in the landscape evoke Tamra West’s description in ‘Remembering displacement’: Memory is … entwined with place (it is localised, framed and made sense of through place) and the spaces (both physical and imagined) and times in which it occurs … Memory is furthermore inscribed on and within the body of the person who remembers and helps form the ways in which they move, act and react. (West, 2013: 177)
This physical memory is fully felt in Les Terres de mon père and its embodiment is obvious through the image of Sedira’s father who recognises what is no longer there and confidently walks in the garden and around his home that is now in ruins. Like the filmed rubble, memory is enmeshed with place but is no longer clear in its purpose.
Katia Kameli
While Sedira films the countryside to recapture her familial heritage that is now in ruins, Katia Kameli films the city of Algiers and shows how colonial memory and ‘Algerian history’ is reproduced and sold in a postcard vendor’s kiosk in her video Le Roman algérien. 10 Whereas Sedira has Algerian parents but experienced her own migration from France to Britain, Kameli also has French and Algerian lineages and lives in Paris. She explores her ‘dual identity’, multiplicity and the ‘in-between’ through her art (Delfina Foundation, 2017) and, like Sedira, her art is influenced directly by postcolonial theory. In her so-called Algerian novel, she juxtaposes contemporary Algerian passers-by with portable and consumable snippets of the past. The customers inspect black-and-white or colour-enhanced postcards of the city in which they stand. Kameli states that she wants to ‘interroger les Algériens sur leur relation à l’image et leur manière de percevoir cet espace-là’, and she chooses specific people who have a relationship to the images – a historian, a lawyer, etc. (MuCEM, 2016c). She states, ‘Le Roman Algérien est une vidéo pensée comme une immersion dans l’histoire Algérienne, et dans la mémoire des hommes au travers d’une collection d’images’ (Kameli, 2017). Because the kiosk is set up anew each morning in an aleatory way, we can read Algerian history in the same random way, and, as she states, it becomes a bit of the fiction: ‘Il y a une lecture complètement transversale de l’histoire de l’Algérie’ (MuCEM, 2016c). On close examination of the images in Le Roman algérien, we see in one shot the same positive images shared on Pied-Noir websites reflecting iconic colonial architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and both Algerian and international revolutionary heroes of the 1960s such as Che Guevara with Ahmed Ben Bella and Fidel Castro. While most of the images in this frame relate to Algerian independence, the nostalgic marks of colonialism can still be seen. This evokes Bénédicte André’s analysis of literary photo-mosaic and identity construction: these postcards organised together create a composite image of Algeria today with their haphazard juxtapositions creating questions about the national story (André, forthcoming). In another frame from the film, an Algerian history student flips through postcard albums filled with images of current (but publicly absent) President Bouteflika, commenting on what she still does not know about her national history and explaining that the place of these past heroes is still being debated at her university.
In a similar way to the overlapping images in the postcard kiosk, the Visite guidée led by Kameli through the ‘Made in Algeria’ exhibition produces another reading of the art. The artist’s memory and her voice are intertwined and now layered over the exhibition pieces. She comments on specific pieces that inspire her and she enriches the viewing with her interpretations. For example, Kameli provides a historic and personal explanation of the artwork of Jean-Antoine Siméon-Fort’s ‘Le Combat du Col de Médéah en janvier 1831’. Her father is from Médéah and she recounts numerous memories of the terrain and the house where her family lives. She finishes her analysis by saying, ‘C’est autre chose. C’est un autre pays maintenant.’ 11 As Kameli approaches her own contribution to the exhibition, she explains what she filmed in Algeria to the museum’s visitors who mill about, not always paying attention to her. While remembering her creative process, Kameli explains what she sees in the photos. At the same time, filmed conversations appear on the screen behind her subtitled in French. When relayed back to the viewers at home, Kameli’s ekphrasis is juxtaposed with the images in the film and now also the spectators in the Visite guidée. In this way, the exhibition itself becomes like Le Roman algérien which can be interpreted by the viewer in an aleatory way.
As Andreas Huyssen contends, an urban imaginary in its temporal reach may well put different things in one place: memories of what there was before, imagined alternatives to what there is. The strong marks of present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses, and heterotopias. (Huyssen, 2003: 7)
Kameli films an abundance of images at this kiosk and both important and ordinary people interact with them, showing how multiple temporal spaces and perspectives can be joined in one filmed moment. Kameli’s palmipsestic work in the city shows how colonial memory as well as the revolutionary memory remain simultaneously enmeshed in the contemporary vision of Algiers, like the layered remnants of rubble and rubbish interwoven through Sedira’s landscape – two versions of the past still visible but uncertain in purpose. Both Kameli and Sedira produce contemporary images of Algeria, but this Algeria is not their home. They both have their own vision of the past as migrants. Kameli states the often repeated phrase, ‘On quitte un pays; on ne revient jamais dans le même pays’ (MuCEM, 2016c).
Conclusion
The ‘Made in Algeria’ exhibition shows how the French, migrants included, have made their own conception of Algeria across the centuries. In the earlier pieces, Algeria is to some extent ‘missing in action’ as the exhibits (and original drawings) were conceived by and for the French. But in the contemporary artwork created by a diverse group of Franco-Algerian citizens, migrants and exiles, Algeria is filmed both far away and close up; the terrain is interwoven with colonial remnants and revolutionary rubble. How the artists and curators see the exhibition is well defined but how this multi-layered image of Algeria appears to the French viewers in Marseille or to those of us reading at home remains uncharted.
In her discussion of the exhibition, Catherine Sentis asks, ‘Quelle sorte d’être humain je serais si je ne comprenais pas la douleur de ceux qui ont quitté un territoire?’. She underscores the unclosed wounds, traces left by ‘la présence française’ in Algeria (Canalnaf Télévision, 2016). Though the exhibition tells a collective story of how France came to understand (and indeed control) Algeria, it also tells an intensely personal story of what remains today for these artists and how multiple layers of history, from colonial rule to the revolution, remain etched upon Algeria. Though the personal exploration of Algeria is still largely achieved from the outside, beginning with the exhibition’s inception, one day ‘dans ce passage de la rue Vivienne, à Paris, où se croisent quotidiennement quelques centaines de personnes’ (MuCEM, 2016a: 6), as we see with Sedira’s slithering red stripe along the frontier lines covering the Algerian landscape, contemporary artists use layered images to highlight, for better or worse, how the pasts of France and Algeria are still entwined today.