On November 5 1970, members of the Black Panther Party faced trial at the New York Supreme Court for conspiracy, arson and other charges. That day, Joseph Phillis, an assistant district attorney, insisted on showing the film The Battle of Algiers (1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo as part of the prosecution’s evidence. The film follows the Algerian struggle for independence in the 1950s, which Phillis argued was material the Panthers used in their guerrilla warfare training. The screening was meant to stigmatise the Black Panthers and compare them with the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), but the strategy backfired and in May 1971 the Panthers were all acquitted. Edwin Kennebeck, one of the jurors, admitted: “The film did more to help me see things from the defence point of view than the DA [district attorney] suspected.”
A few years before the trial, Pontecorvo’s film had been awarded the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, causing outrage in France, where the film was censored and screened publicly only in 2004. The Battle of Algiers is one of many cinematographic co-productions between Algeria, France and Italy made shortly after Algeria’s independence in 1962.
For Zineb Sedira, a French-Algerian artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans from archival research in cinematheques to photomontages, these co-productions represent the “solidarity between civil rights and anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s and the 1970s”. In a conversation I had with the artist while she was in Cape Town to present her film Dreams Have No Titles (2022), she mentioned that collaborations between ideologically aligned filmmakers constituted “a way of resisting misinformation and colonisation”. So much so, that after independence “as a new country that had very little — economically speaking — and had a large debt, the Algerian government decided to put money into filmmaking”.
Despite being supporters of the Algerian independence movement, Sedira’s parents left rural Algeria in 1962 in search of economic opportunities. Born in France in 1963, Zineb was raised on the outskirts of Paris in a community of North African migrants. “We always had an attachment to Algeria. For my parents, France was a middle passage: they stayed long enough to make money and make sure that their children study, and in the mid-1980s part of the family went back to Algiers,” said the artist.
Sedira stayed in France and later moved to the UK, where she’s currently based. Her work has been featured in bienniales and solo and group exhibitions in France, Italy, the UK, the US, South Korea, Morocco and others.
Last year, Dreams Have No Titles premiered at the 59th Venice Biennale, where Sedira was the first French artist of Algerian descent selected to represent France. In the film, she re-enacts famous scenes from anti-colonial films such as Le Bal (1983) by Ettore Scola and The Battle of Algiers. For the artist, music, intimacy and friendship form part of what she calls a “joyful resistance as a way of survival”. Something that can be seen in the film as Sedira, her friends and collaborators playfully form part of the cast and “dance to the tempo of life” — as she says in the voice-over.
Although the artist often references liberation struggles from the past, she doesn’t fall into the trap of romanticising them. Still, she thinks the fact that most of them failed is not to say there aren’t things “to learn and adapt”.
The artist is interested in “putting out things that were neglected by time, purposely or accidentally ignored” to “restore them and share them”. This approach has led her to “access” Algerian history from individual narratives, long-forgotten archival documents and oral storytelling.
Her film Gardiennes d'images (2010), for example, demonstrates her efforts to understand Algeria from different standpoints. The film follows the recollections and memories of Safia Kouaci, widow of Mohammed Kouaci — the official photographer of the provisional government of the Algerian Republic. Safia’s testimony attests to the important role of women in the Algerian revolution and is one of the few records of Kouaci’s photographic oeuvre.
For the past 30 years, Sedira has done extensive research in cinematheques in Algeria, France and Italy. Her findings inform her collages — which she describes as “a way of minimising the frustration of not being able to share everything that I find” — as well as some of her films. In fact, her discoveries have been of enormous relevance for the artistic community at large. Like the case of Les Mains Libres (1964) by Ennio Lorenzini, a film that was thought to be lost for almost 60 years until she “managed to pull out it of the archives in Rome”. She restored it in co-operation with the Cineteca di Bologna. It’s now available to whoever is interested.
The artist has also taken an interest in the 1969 Pan-African festival in Algiers. For her, the festival wasn’t about skin colour. “It’s about inviting everybody who experienced any type of political oppression, colonialism or dictatorship.”
In 2019, Sedira was commissioned to produce a piece related to the 1969 festival for her solo show L’espace d’un instant (A Brief Moment) at Jeu de Paume in Paris. It was then, in her house in Brixton, London, that she first thought of her living room differently: “A living room is a place where you debate, you discuss, you drink, you dance, you listen to music, you raise your kids. So I thought of using it as a metaphor for the Pan-African festival of 1969 in Algeria. The festival was an encounter where there was a sharing of knowledge between all those liberation movements. My home is in Brixton, known for its militant history, so it connects with the spirit of anti-colonialism,” she said.
It was important for her to privilege an autobiographical component in relation to politics. For the Parisian exhibition, the artist created a life-size diorama of her living room titled Scene 3: Way of Life (2019), which showed how domestic spheres can give birth to critical discourse. The installation included family photographs, objects and artworks.
Her installation of photomontages with 1960s objects and books, For A Brief Moment the World was on Fire (2019), uses archival materials to reconsider and challenge official historical narratives and also refers to the Pan-African cultural gathering.
In a scene of The Battle of Algiers, the actor playing Ben M’hidi says: “It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it. But it’s only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin.” Considering how many emancipatory movements haven’t delivered on their promises once taking office, a question arises: in what ways can artists — in particular those from the global south — partake in revolution today? Sedira, for one, doesn’t think she has the “political strength to be considered an activist”. But her relentless work to give others access to the materials she unearths from the archives is a form of activism if generosity is read as a political gesture.
The group exhibition Unbind at Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, features Sedira’s photomontages in the installation For a Brief Moment the World was on Fire (2019) and her collection of militant music on vinyl records We Have Come Back (2019) alongside works by Yto Barrada, Sue Williamson, Grada Kilomba, Kiluanji Kia Henda and Kapwani Kiwanga. The exhibition runs until November 11.
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