Archives of the Algerian Revolution, Visual (Re)mediations and the Making of Photographic Heritage

Zineb Sedira’s video practice has focused, since the early 2000s, on the recollections of those who had lived through the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62). Due to Sedira’s interest in oral histories, her work has been discussed in scholarship as excavating occluded narratives and filling in historical gaps. The broader premise of Sedira’s practice is, however, to investigate how historical narratives are formulated, and how they are then transmitted among generations. This paper will focus on Gardiennes d’images (2010), a video installation which mediates the encounter between Sedira, the artist Amina Menia, and Safia Kouaci, the widow of Algerian photographer Mohamed Kouaci, who in 1958 began working for the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic. Kouaci produced official portraits of the revolution’s leaders and images of training camps for the mujahideen in Tunisia. Since his death in 1996, the photographic collection has resided with Safia Kouaci. While Gardiennes d’images focuses on both the photographic prints and the widow’s recollections of her husband’s role in the revolution, it unsettles the relationship between them. The paper will argue that the use of multiple screens, close-ups and parallel sources of sound all work to disrupt the emergence of a linear history, querying the role of the narrator in framing the revolution’s photographic archives. Given the politicised appropriation of the revolution’s legacy by the Algerian state since 1962, and the refracted transmission of its histories to younger generations, this paper will read Gardiennes d’images as an inquiry into the stakes of archiving the revolution.