Fluid Grounds II
After 132 years of French colonial occupation, Algeria celebrated its independence on July 5, 1962. Algerian independence also marked the official end of the bloody Algerian Revolution (1954–1962). Over the summer of 1962, around 800,000 people left the newly independent Algeria, mostly for metropolitan France. These were the European settlers—by then called the Pied-noir—for whom 1962 continues to represent the moment of profound rupture and the start of their exile from what they perceived to be an ‘Algerian-French’ homeland.
Fluid Grounds reflects the digital practices of remembrance and contestation of France's colonial past used by the Pied-noir. One of the strategies that Takriti employs in the work—divided into two parts, a digital photo montage and a video—is built on the confrontation of different ideologies in image-text or text-text collages. In the digital photo montage works, Takriti uses imagery circulating on the web—particularly, by Instagram accounts and Facebook groups dedicated by the Pied-noir as sites of memory and nostalgia—for example, propaganda posters of the Organisation de l’armee secrete (OAS), which was founded in 1961 to fight Algerian independence and also opposed the increasingly liberal French state. Takriti juxtaposes this with quotes from Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnes de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1962), which eerily anticipate some of the images circulating on the web.
In the video, Takriti expands the used imagery to include videos uploaded to YouTube that either portray an imaginary return to Algeria or clips that were filmed as part of tourist trips in which Pied-noir and their descendants embark on a ferry from Marseille towards Algeria and are uploaded as a documentation of the experience. Takriti recalls the uncanny encounters while watching the videos, such as the moment when a group of people starts singing the Pied-noir’s anthem, The Song of the Africans1, upon arriving at the Algerian shore, or imagery of a man arriving at the port of the city of Oran wearing a T-shirt with the colonial stamp of the city used by the French and covering it later in the video as he was talking to an Algerian policeman, or when they are spreading what appears to be ashes of beloved ones in a playground while Algerian children are playing to then collect it back with the earth that had merged with it.
“The afterlife of slavery is not only a political and social problem but an aesthetic one as well,2” writes literary scholar and author Saidiya Hartman. Here, we can replace "slavery" with "colonialism." Takriti’s work also deals with the question of the representation of colonial crimes and their “return,” disguised as a longing for the “old homeland” in the virtual space of social media. Thus, she constantly asks what can and should be shown and likewise lends the images as well as the possibility of opacity, of non-transparency, whereby precisely not everything can and should be seen.
1. "Le Chant des Africains" (The Song of the Africans) is the unofficial anthem of the Pied-noir community in France and its former colonies in Africa. The song was reportedly being used by the Europeans supporting the status quo of French Algeria against its independence supported by president Charles de Gaulle. As a result the song was forbidden from the French military until it was authorized again, in 1969.
2. Hartman, Saidiya. Will Answer to the Name Glenn. In: Glenn Ligon: America, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2011