Algeria was colonised by France in 1830, after they captured the territory from the Ottoman Empire. The occupation lasted until 1962 when the Front National de Libération (FLN) won the independence of Algeria after a seven-and-a-half year war. Algeria was seen by the colonial state as an extension of France. It was categorised as a 'departement' (small region) rather than a 'colony'. In French schools, learning about the Algerian War of Independence is optional alongside the 'israelo-palestinian conflict'. My grandparents are from the generation who fought against the FLN in 1962, a war experience that is still being deeply silenced. A history of violence runs through what is unsaid. Algeria and France share a history that is presented as something in the past, an optional 'event' to study in History class (to speak of an 'event' is a euphemism used in French media to describe raids in Selma and Guelma in 1945, and then to describe the War of Independence). The lack of knowledge that French citizens have about their own country's colonisations enables a legacy of violence to persist into the present-day. From a will to deconstruct what I have learnt in History classes, and a desire to burst the blister of cultural silence, I want to open the door to narratives that have been, and are still being, erased by decades of colonialism.
THE CUPBOARD
My grandparents' house is a renovated old farm. The stairs, the structure, the doors are made of wood, the walls are made of big cold stones. To get to the cupboard, you need to go up a dozen of stairs, along a corridor, up another two steps, open a door on your left and squeeze between a small side table and a sofa to reach the door of the cupboard. It is a human-size wooden cupboard, deep enough to put large boxes in it. Inside the cupboard, you can smell the dust mixed with dry wood, there is no lock, you just need to push down on a piece of wood that prevents the door from swinging open. Everything inside is very organised; photo albums, notebooks ordered by dates, booklets with different colours. On the right of the middle shelf are two boxes containing old slides and glass-sheet negative photographs with labels inscribed with a curly handwriting. They are dusty, with some scratches, some of them have shades of blue, others are more brown-orange. I can see the images properly when I hold them up to the window facing the West. I gather sixty of them taken in French occupied Algeria in the 1920s, maps and scans of drawings of maps, amassing awkward questions about my family's colonial heritage.
ADMINISTRATION, LANDS & EMILE
Administrative and juridical systems are key mechanisms of the colonial system: they hide the violences inflicted on stolen lands and exploited populations behind laws, regulations and rights to make those violences appear acceptable and legitimate. In the words of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, 'these devices are used to render violence into acceptable political landscapes' 1One of the claims of colonialism is that its mission is to make the soil fertile again; France wanted to accomplish this by creating hundreds of 'villages of colonisation', offering parcels of stolen land to French settlers at a cheap price or even for free through the creation of official documents to state their legitimacy. Berthelot was one of those villages, where my great-great-grandfather, the soldier and photographer Émile Berthélémy, lived between 1919 and 1927. Emile was a banal coloniser. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay describes: 'The perpetrator is not conceived here as an aggrandized persona, but rather as an ordinary man or woman, a citizen-perpetrator, whose actions seem ordinary to herself or himself. They take part in or acquiesce to crimes they have learned to see as proper law enforcement or part of missions accomplished in their fields of expertise.' 2 In the social and political context of post-World War I, Algeria was a place where many French citizens could attain a dominant position and a comfortable lifestyle compared to the metropole. Colonial violence was common and profitable. Albert Memmi describes the figure of the settler colonial: 'If the small colonizer defends the colonial system so vigorously, it is because he benefits from it to some extend. His gullibility lies in the fact that to protect his very limited interests, he protects other infinitely more important ones, of which he is, incidentally, the victim. But, though dupe and victim, he also gets his share.'3
THE CAMERA
In the 1920s it was not so common for a settler to be a photographer. Having a camera for personal use at the beginning of the twentieth century was expensive and the device was not easily transportable. Émile took a lot of pictures of his daily life. The photographic images are a gift as an archival material, a witness of the past, and a sign of power. The photograph performs power as much as it witnesses it. Émile took lands and captured images, activating 'the power of the shutter to shape the territorial imagination' 4. Even after independence, his photographic memories persist, erasing the lived realities of those who were colonised. In the context of settler colonialism, paying attention to vernacular photography is a way to uncover the violence that is latent in everyday practices.
MAPS
The map is supposed to help you find your way, but in fact it define territories. It has an authority that is non-negotiable in our collective imaginary. Colonial regimes use violence to displace people from spaces to settle and dominate, and mapping is an apparatus that naturalises colonial power. Writing on the plantation system of the Southern states of the US, Tiffany Lethabo King argues in her book The Black Shoals, Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies: 'Anxious White settlers hired [cartographers] to design a map of their property, as well as a representation of their dreams and aspirations for the region'.5 Mapping was a projection of a colonial goal: 'the project of writing and mapping the human as a settled, and therefore finished, project.' 6The maps and drawings found in my family archives reveal the modifications of lands and resources to build the village of Berthelot. Through animation and collage, I attempt to subvert the maps of Berthelot so that speculative landscapes can emerge and destabilise the colonial perspective that these archival materials were intended to establish. Spinning, zooming in and out, slowing down, accelerating and turning the images upside-down are movements that the camera of the animation performs. Disorientating the viewer is a way to reapproriate the maps by removing its stablising viewpoint. In a practice that strives to contribute to a process of decolonisation, maps are a material to denaturalise in order to highlight the complexity of our identities, of the places we belong, of our connections to lands, and of our answers when we’re asked: 'Where are you from ?'
ARCHIVES
Pulling out the archives from the cupboard gives visibility to what is supposed to be kept in the dust. In doing so, it may be possible to create a bridge of solidarity between past and present, making connection with people around us through conversations, and with the deceased, going through the existing or speculative narratives of their past. Looking at archives not as neutral documents but as acts of colonial establishment enables an understanding of the operations of violence in the context in which colonial territories were produced, described and classified. Opening up the possiblity of looking at an old photograph from the colonisation of Algeria differently than with a neutral gaze followed by the statement 'it is what it is', may enable better understanding of the power relations of yesterday, which continue to shape today's present. In this project, the choice of not producing more pictures but working exclusively with photographic archives questions what it means to be a photographer with a decolonial practice nowadays. Perhaps there is a refusal to use the shutter for fear of reproducing violence and a renouncement of feeding the unstoppable production of images. Those photographs in the cupboard exist at the expense of the suppression of others' memories.Revealing personal archives is a shift from the private to the public in shading light on colonial practices of erasure. Bringing these moments into our present with collages and drawings makes a gesture to go beyond the frame. The exploration of gaps and hors-champ summon ignored existances of lands and lives excluded for the benefit of the construction of ‘european villages’ in a North African land. Denaturalising the structures of power that archival materials perform permits speculation of imaginary cartographies to weave connections between the blanks left by the photographs and between the present and the past in order to practice reparation following the words of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay : 'Reparations are part of the incessant labor of repair. Asking the question "what are reparations?" again and again, with others, is not an attempt to find an ultimate answer – to finally be able to pay, in Truth's terms – but to affirm that it is through the potentialization of history that the labor of reparations could yield the recovery of a shared world of common care.' 7
1 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism, 2019, p.45
2 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism, 2019, p.48
3 Albert Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized, 1957, p.55
4 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism, 2019, p.39
5 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals, Offshore formations of Black and Native Studies, 2019, p.80
6 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals, Offshore formations of Black and Native Studies, 2019, p.76
7 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism, 2019, p.565