Dealing with the troubled political history of 20th century Algeria, this piece was built through the manipulation and confrontation of images from different sources: archives, footage from the time when the video was made and fictional shots. The imagetic discourse, punctuated by Algerian popular sayings that segue the segments together, explores the fact that the successive attempts at modernization, simultaneous with the struggle for independence from France, took place under different forms of violence. Thus, the efforts of Algeria’s mostly nationalistic political movements fell through, as they failed to overcome the condition of “other” of the French civilization, the figure of power par excellence in the Western dominance of Algerian people. The video also questions how the colonizing metropolis imposed this place of otherness, combining it with other negative insignias like those of the Enemy, the Threat, or Evil. Thus, Algerian nationalism and the colonizer’s view are seen as two sides of the same coin, revealing the Algerian struggle for independence as a game lost from the outset, whose rules were rigged to always give the dominant side an edge. Like other works by the artist, it looks for a unifying thread in the labyrinthine relationships between North and South; East and West; Modernity and Tradition.
