Archiving the Algerian Revolution in Zineb Sedira's Gardiennes d'images

Abstract

In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art of Algiers (Musée Public National d'Art Moderne et Contemporain d'Alger; MAMA) staged a group exhibition that featured photography from the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62).1Les Photographes de Guerre, Les Djounoud du noir et blanc (May 14–August 30, 2013) featured blown-up black-and-white photographs on three floors of the museum, a repurposed department store from the early twentieth century in the former European quarter of Algiers. Images taken by professional and amateur Algerian photographers were placed alongside those by international and French image makers, revealing the broader networks of visual production during the war (see Djehiche and Djilali 2013). Fought between the National Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale; FLN) and the French colonial state, the Algerian War of Independence holds a prolific place within histories of decolonization due to its excessive violence and impact on other liberation movements on the continent. For a long time, however, it was thought to have been pictured exclusively through French visual production, which often served to support or produce colonial propaganda (see Stora 2005: 199–220).2 However, by unearthing the work of Algerian photographers and mapping the extensive infrastructure of photographic studios that supported FLN politics across the region, the exhibition countered assumptions of an alleged absence of visual representation produced from “within” the revolution.Almost a decade before, Photographier la guerre d'Algérie, an exhibition organized by Laurent Gervereau and Benjamin Stora at the Hôtel de Sully in Paris (January 23–April 18, 2004) had offered a far more Franco centric view of the war's photographic legacy. Gervereau and Stora's show featured the work of official French military photographers, including René Bail and Marc Flament, photojournalists Marc Riboud and Raymond Depardon, as well as international reporters including Dickey Chapelle and Kryn Taconis. The exhibition featured only a handful of images taken by Algerian photographers, all of whom were relegated to anonymity. An “Algerian point of view” in photography, the exhibition's organizers lamented, was rare during the war (Gervereau and Stora 2004: 7–9). Even in instances when the revolution succeeded in producing visual representation for its own political purposes, they added, it was quickly buried under the flood of pictures produced by French propaganda and published, for instance, in the military magazine Le Bled. Yet given the wealth of images shown at MAMA in 2013, these claims need to be reassessed. While Stora and Gervereau rightly noted that unequal financial resources on the French and Algerian sides informed the war's visual production, they obscured the revolution's varied photographic cultures by relegating the Algerian bodies of work to the margins of the show. The exhibition organized a decade later in Algiers proposed to see the war's visual legacy differently. By revealing the broader networks of image production during the war, which included many African as well as international actors, the show complicated views of an entirely French-controlled visual culture.3Among the images on display at MAMA were those taken by the photographer Mohamed Kouaci (1922–1996), who worked for the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (Gouvernement provisoire de la République algérienne; GPRA) between 1958 and 1962. The GPRA was a government-in-exile formed to give further legitimacy to the anticolonial revolution and to strengthen the international negotiating position of the FLN (Vince 2015: 37). When Mohamed Kouaci began working for the GPRA, its seat was in Tunisia, which became an important base for Algerian nationalists following the retreat of French troops in 1956 (Bizard 2002: 225). Mohamed Kouaci's position within the FLN granted him privileged access to the inner circles of the revolution. He photographed FLN leaders, their international allies, cultural events, maquisards (rural guerrilla fighters), the editorial offices of the revolution's main media outlet El Moudjahid, as well as Algerian refugees living in camps in western Tunisia. While the curators of the exhibition held at MAMA presented his photographs as part of the war's broader visual production, there have been increased efforts since the early 2000s to portray Mohamed Kouaci as the official photographer of the revolution of 1954–62.This article is only partly about Mohamed Kouaci's practice and the broader production of images during the Algerian revolution. It focuses equally on the remediation of Mohamed Kouaci's photographic collection in Zineb Sedira's multichannel video work Gardiennes d'images [Image Keepers] (2010), which forms an inquiry into the telling, and retelling, of the history of the Algerian War of Independence. Split into two video projections screened on opposite walls, the work features an elderly woman as its main protagonist in a domestic space, shown through enclosed shots (Fig. 1).4 In one of the projections, which is further split into two frames, she appears alongside the Algiers-based artist Amina Menia as they browse through boxes containing black-and-white photographic prints (Fig. 2). The two women are occasionally joined by Sedira, who emerges from behind the camera. It is soon revealed that the main protagonist is Safia Kouaci, the widow of Mohamed Kouaci and the custodian of his photographic collection. In the left-hand, black-and-white frame, the camera moves closely to the photographic prints that are handled by the women, emphasizing their fragile materiality. The right-hand, color frame focuses on Safia Kouaci as she recounts the difficulties of preserving the collection and its existence outside of public archives. Sound emanates only from the latter frame, leaving Safia Kouaci's words disassociated from the historical photographs that pass through the left-hand frame. On the opposite wall, a single-frame projection figures Safia Kouaci alone as she recounts her and Mohamed Kouaci's involvement with the FLN and their support for the revolution. Her recollections span geographies such as Algeria, France, Italy, and Tunisia, and flesh out the Kouacis' distinct experiences during the war. In this projection, the widow's words are interlaced with Mohamed Kouaci's photographs, offering a more coherent viewing experience than the split-frame projection. In both projections, Safia Kouaci emerges as a witness to the war and a custodian of a photographic collection that chronicles the birth of independent Algeria.Given the long-held belief that the Algerian War of Independence was pictured primarily by those affiliated with the French colonial state, Gardiennes d'images undoubtedly emerges from a broader desire to trace histories of photography that foreground African image makers.5 Sedira has frequently worked through the histories and memories of the Algerian War of Independence, albeit filtered predominantly through family recollections. As a result, existing scholarship has tended to discuss the artist's practice through the lens of excavation and retrieval of forgotten images and sidelined memories pertaining to the war. Whether considered in relation to a broader and tentatively defined Algerian or French collective memory, her work has been persistently framed as filling in mnemonic gaps or even performing a reparative function (McGonagle 2007; Milliard 2011; Nimis 2015).6 Yet to read Sedira's video works, which make extensive use of oral recollections and historical documents through the lens of absence, visibility, and recovery does little to specify what histories are actually at stake. Departing from such readings, this article will consider Gardiennes d'images in relation to the shifting reception of Mohamed Kouaci's photographic legacy in Algeria and the very concrete work his images have been performing within the different commemorations of the war since 1962. In doing so, it seeks to flesh out the histories and positions at work in Gardiennes d'images with the aim to understand what role Mohamed Kouaci's photographic collection could play in the telling of Algeria's national history. Gardiennes d'images was not premised on making visible a collection that remains in private hands. By deploying a filmic language marked by excessive montage, split screens, and fragmentation, and often disrupting clear alignments between Safia Kouaci's recollections and Mohamed Kouaci's pictures, the work explores the relationships among photography, retrospective readings, and the formulation of historical narratives. Given the heightened interest in Mohamed Kouaci's photographic practice in Algeria in recent years, Gardiennes d'images queries how a photographic collection produced from within revolutionary ranks can be marshalled to tell the history of decolonization long after independence had been achieved.In Gardiennes d'images, Sedira makes it clear that what is at stake is a national history. While the work is predominantly composed of close-ups, with the camera carefully mapping the domestic space, it also includes a shot of the equestrian statue of Emir Abdelkader, a national hero who fought the French between 1832 and 1847 (Fig. 3). The artist filmed this symbol of early resistance to the French through the window of Safia Koauci's apartment, marking the photographic collection and the widow's recollections as part of the nation's history. Indeed, Safia Kouaci is not only the sole custodian of the collection but also a former moudjahida (woman resistance fighter) who actively participated in the revolution. Together with Mohamed Kouaci, she was closely engaged in the struggle for an independent nation, having joined the revolution through a FLN branch in Paris in 1956 (Chominot 2010: 240). In Paris, where they had moved in 1946, Safia Kouaci attended a technical college, while Mohamed Kouaci worked at a factory and took evening photography classes, honing skills that would become key to the liberation struggle (Chominot 2010: 242). An active supporter of Algerian independence, Mohamed Kouaci documented gatherings of the General Union of Algerian Workers (Union générale des travailleurs algériens; UGTA) and of the General Union of Muslim Students of Algeria in Paris (Union générale des étudiants musulmans algériens; UGEMA). It was in these organizations that Algeria's future government ministers, including M'hamed Yazid and Mustapha Lacheref, were also active members. Safia Kouaci joined a FLN-led theater group directed by the playwright Mustapha Kateb, with whom she performed in Libya and Yugoslavia with the aim of drawing the attention of audiences abroad to the violence of the conflict at home (Chominot 2010: 242). During the group's tours, Mohamed Kouaci photographed their performances. Some of these images are included in Gardiennes d'images, revealing Mohamed and Safia Kouaci's distinct roles during the war (Fig. 4). Following their arrival in Tunis in March 1958, he headed the GPRA's photographic services, while she worked as secretary to the Minister of Information. They remained close to the FLN once independence had been won in 1962, and Mohamed Kouaci headed the new government's photographic services until 1969 (Chominot 2020). In a personal conversation, Elaine Mokhtefi, author of the memoir Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers (2019) and a civil servant for the FLN government between 1962 and 1974, remembered that Safia and Mohamed Kouaci attended all state functions together, actively participating in the formation of a new Algeria.7Following Mohamed Kouaci's death in 1996, Safia Kouaci closed the photographic studio in Algiers which he had been given by the postwar government and became the sole custodian of the collection.8 In 2007, she was involved in the publication of Kuwāsī, 1956–1963 (Khallāṣ 2007), the first catalogue devoted entirely to Mohamed Kouaci's practice, contributing a short essay on the revolution's cultural output (Kouaci 2007: 111–12). The comprehensive publication contains multiple essays in Arabic on the photographer's practice and offers an expanded glimpse into the surviving collection. While the introductory essay cites a glaring gap in research as the reason behind its publishing (Khallaş 2007: 10), the volume is equally concerned with how to picture the revolution almost half a century after its end. Crucially, the catalogue foregrounds photographs picturing the revolution's cultural and political dimensions. One photograph shows the young refugee El-Hadi Rajab as he performs a song by the Algerian musician Ahmed Wahbi following an invitation by Kateb (Fig. 5). Other images record historic events such as the first meeting of the GPRA in September 1958 (Fig. 6). The catalogue further reveals the international support for the revolution as readers encounter photographs of aid parcels sent by the Yugoslavian Red Cross arriving in the port of Tunis (Fig. 7) and of the Algerian delegation to the International Youth Festival in Moscow in July 1957. Finally, the perils of the war are portrayed through the multiple photographs of Algerian refugees displaced along Tunisia's western border (Figs. 8–9).9 The catalogue presents Mohamed Kouaci as a versatile photographer who, as Ismael Ben Hasir notes in another essay, continued to photograph war veterans and their families in his studio after 1962, actively reanimating the memory of the war after independence (Hasir 2007: 18).The publication of the catalogue marked a clear shift in how Mohamed Kouaci's photographs had been hitherto displayed in Algeria. Not only did the volume reveal the authorship of many photographs that had long circulated as anonymous images, but it also offered a view of the revolution beyond armed struggle. As Natalya Vince has outlined, the FLN-sanctioned discourse on the war emphasizes military over political action, alongside the collective sacrifice of the 1.5 million martyrs (Vince 2013: 36). During his lifetime, however, Mohamed Kouaci largely complied with the state's desire to commemorate the war through pictures of combat. In 1984, he edited a volume titled Compagnons de lutte, 1954–1962, published by the Museum of the Army shortly after its opening (Kuwāsī 1984). It features photographs of maquisards bearing arms, raising the Algerian flag, and engaging with the civilian population; nurses attending to fighters; the schooling of children; and the preparation of food in the maquis (Figs. 10–11). The publication cements a view of the revolution as a collective armed effort of all Algerians and erases the competing views on cultural or political decolonization among revolutionaries. Still in 2018, the Algerian Ministry of Culture censored a biopic on one of the founding members of the FLN, Larbi Ben M'Hidi, claiming that it overprivileged political debates at the expense of armed struggle (France 24 2018). The internal struggles among FLN leaders, the Ministry seemed to think, were better left omitted.The short note introducing Compagnons de lutte, 1954–1962 explains that the catalogue comprises images taken by both anonymous maquisards and professional photographers. While their authors are not named, a comparison with other publications reveals the inclusion of several photographs by Mohamed Kouaci.10 Edited by the photographer, the volume places his photographs on a par with those taken by amateur image-makers, revealing his commitment to the revolution's broader strategy to not foreground individual authors. During the war, the articles and photographs published in the newspaper El Moudjahid were rarely signed to reflect the FLN's idea of “collective leadership.”11 Security concerns were, of course, another factor. Mohamed Kouaci's editorial decision to feature his photographs among other unsigned images in Compagnons de lutte, 1954–1962 casts him in the role of an editor who arranges images on the pages of the catalogue rather than as a photographer in his own right. It was perhaps his limited concern for authorship during his lifetime that has led to his images being often displayed as anonymous pictures not protected by copyright. The National Martyrs Museum (Musée national du Moudjahid) in Algiers, for instance, presents Mohamed Kouaci's photographs as Xeroxed or painted copies rather than as photographic prints, revealing little concern for their status as material or aesthetic objects, and makes no mention of their maker.It was not until Safia Kouaci facilitated the publication of Kuwāsī, 1956–1963 that Mohamed Kouaci's photographic legacy became the object of heightened scholarly, curatorial, and artistic inquiry.12 The catalogue features in Gardiennes d'images as Sedira occasionally directs her camera towards its pages, moving slowly over the photographs (Fig. 12). Early in the video work, Safia Koauci stresses the significance of Mohamed Kouaci's collection, deeming him “the photographer of the revolution.” Her assertions are encouraged by Sedira and Menia, who often contend in interviews the centrality of the collection for exploring an “Algerian point of view” in photography from the war:In her discussion of the collection, Sedira positions Mohamed Kouaci's work as the sole example of a practice that could complicate views offered by French propaganda photography. Echoing Sedira's viewpoint, Menia has also claimed that the collection reveals “images from our side, our camp, when thousands of images made by the French army or French reporters were inundating the world” (Allsop and Menia 2012). In order to emphasize Mohamed Kouaci's distinct position within the revolution, Gardiennes d'images features an image depicting the photographer with camera in hand standing next to ALN fighters, presumably in a Tunisian training camp (Fig. 13).Yet, parallel to his work as a photographer, Mohamed Kouaci also headed the Ministry of Information's photographic services (Chominot 2010: 243).13 In this capacity, he received and developed photographs taken by the maquisards who were equipped with cameras in order to document the atrocities committed by the French, as well as the solidarity in the maquis (Merdaci 2004: 172). These images were later reprinted in the FLN's media outlets. The front page of El Moudjahid from 1959, for instance, featured a photograph of Colonel Amirouche standing next to an ALN officer (Fig. 14). Likely taken by an anonymous maquisard, it pictures the colonel with a pair of binoculars in his hands, suggesting that far from determining the war's development, the French too were under strict surveillance. Photographs taken from “within” armed struggle stressed the organized nature of the ALN and the presence of its units throughout the country. These pictures held a radical potential during the war, as they offered a viewpoint largely unavailable to international photographers and journalists who had no direct access to the maquisards.14 Fueling collective imagination and revealing the strength of the ALN to international observers, these images were key for the FLN's rhetoric of collective struggle and attendant victory.Since Mohamed Kouaci was unable to cross into Algeria following the establishment of the Morice Line (a defensive line constructed by the French along the Algerian-Tunisian border) in September 1957, he relied on the fighters to photograph life in the maquis. Further, he scouted regional and international press for images that could be reappropriated and recoded to suit the revolution's own needs. He and the French deserter Daniel Leterrier assembled a vast visual archive whose contents could be marshalled in support of the FLN. Marie Chominot has noted that by December 1961, the number of archived negatives and prints reached nine million (Chominot 2010: 252). According to Ahmed Bedjaoui, the FLN's archiving strategy was not only motivated by a desire to counter French propaganda but also anticipated the needs of the future independent state, which would be able to assert its legitimacy through archives (Bedjaoui 2014: 61).In independent Algeria, however, Mohamed Kouaci's photographic collection remains in private hands and is not deposited in state archives. Like many other collections pertaining to twentieth-century African liberation movements, it is kept outside of public view (Bajorek 2013: 69). Gardiennes d'images grows out of Safia Kouaci's reluctance to donate the photographic collection to public archives, which she considers unreliable and ill-equipped repositories of historical material.15 Given the cooption of the revolution's legacy by the FLN, archives figure as sites of operational power rather than of collective engagement in the popular imagination of many Algerians (Asseraf and Rahal 2016). This detachment from public institutions is mirrored in the case of Egypt where archives, in Omnia El Shakry's words, form a “dense locus of postcolonial power” (2015: 924). Safia Kouaci's refusal to donate the collection to archives pushes into sharp relief the still-deepening mistrust of state institutions.16 While attempts to control how people think about the past rarely succeed (Vince 2013: 32–52),17 history has become one of the key tools to maintain political power in Algeria.By focusing on a collection that is part of a national heritage, Gardiennes d'images forms an exercise in the telling of a history that is foundational to the modern Algerian state. It pictures the relaying of a national past outside of state structures in an attempt to disassociate history from the state that roots its legitimacy in the war of decolonization. Completed three years after the publication of the Kuwāsī, 1956–1963 catalogue, Gardiennes d'images mirrors the publication's premise to picture Mohamed Kouaci's collection as a coherent and authored body of work that draws attention to the revolution's political and cultural facets, rather than the armed struggle alone. At the same time, the work is entangled with subsequent interpretations of the war's histories and legacies, forming a meditation on the collection's role in the telling of a national history.There is a great sense of nostalgia for the past in Gardiennes d'images, as Safia Kouaci considers the revolution a formative personal and collective experience, recalling the many decisions she and her husband had made due to the needs of the “cause.” “You just went for it. You just did it!” she states, while recounting the times when their clandestine activity resulted in police searches of their flat in Paris. The single-frame projection in particular focuses on Safia Kouaci's memories from the revolution, while the split-frame projection privileges a conversation about the photographic collection. In the former, the widow reminisces about her and her husband's involvement in the liberation struggle, the violence of the French, and the FLN's cultural output. “It was a formidable time,” she exclaims at one point, adding that “the revolution, during these seven years of war, created more intellectuals than in 130 years of colonization.” The revolution, she continues, also levelled gender inequalities and assured women's liberties. Asserting that Algerians “were all brothers and sisters” during the war, she mobilizes a narrative that has been oft repeated by the postcolonial state. However, scholars have been divided as to whether women's presence in the ranks of the ALN had indeed been accepted by their male counterparts (Harbi 1980: 79; Amrane-Minne 1991: 244). Accounts of rape in the maquis, virginity tests, and forced marriages all disrupt a view of a peaceful coexistence between men and women supposedly united by a shared desire for independence (Harbi 1995: 5–7; Meynier 2002). Indeed, the phrase “brothers and sisters” has often been deployed in official discourse in Algeria to bypass questions of sexuality, which have also been absent from women's own testimonies about the war (Seferdjeli 2012: 249). Safia Kouaci's account of the revolution thus obfuscates these internal frictions in favor of offering a highly nostalgic view of a long-gone past.While Safia Kouaci's recollections echo the state-sanctioned narrative that casts the war as metaphor of unity, equality, and solidarity, they are also hybrid in nature as they combine official discourse, biography, and critical views on the state's capacity to care for its archives. Towards the end of the single-frame projection, the camera zooms onto photographs of ALN nurses in military uniforms and the moudjahidat Djamila Bouhired, Baya Hocine, and Zohra Drif being received by FLN officials in Tunis following the ceasefire of March 1962 (Fig. 15). Pointing at a group of three women, Safia Kouaci states that they all served prison time due to their clandestine activity and emphasizes the significance of the liberation war for women's rights. “Women played a very important role [during the war],” she asserts, adding, “That is when she got her freedom.” Yet, as she points at a photograph of women in the maquis raising the Algerian flag, she stresses that “at the time, women were equal to men” (emphasis added by author). The emphasis on the specificity of women's position during the war implies a sense of disappointment at gender relations after independence, a discourse that has been articulated time and again by those critical of the postwar government. Feminists have frequently challenged the official narrative that presents the postcolonial state as both liberator of women and protector of their rights (Amrane-Minne 1991: 262; Ibrahimi 2004). They argued that the war formed an important, albeit brief moment of freedom for women that has found little continuation after 1962. Safia Kouaci's recollections carry a quiet criticism of women's status in independent Algeria as she cites the years of 1954–1962 as a period of gender equality. Her partial disillusionment with the postcolonial state is amplified through the highly nostalgic account of the war, cementing its status as a founding block of the nation.Elsewhere in the single-frame projection, Safia Kouaci stresses that her late husband “loved the South” and points at a photograph of a Touareg man that was taken after independence (Fig. 16). The scene makes manifest the liberating effects of the revolution, since the photograph results from the regained mobility of Algerians following the defeat of the colonial power and Mohamed Kouaci's ability to explore the country's rich cultural heritage.18 In Algeria, the revolution often serves as a benchmark against which the postwar period can be tested. For while it remains a national myth, the expectations placed upon decolonization and the visions of how a postcolonial state could look were far from unanimous. Malika Rahal has identified three main visions of a postwar Algeria that were formulated during the war and that persisted well after independence, leading to a fractured political and ideological landscape after 1962. These, she argued, included “the FLN's Arab and socialist definition; the democrats' nationalist and pluralistic definitions; [or] the Islamic fundamentalists' theocratic and millenarian definition” (Rahal 2012: 128). Further, many veterans of the war have expressed their disappointment at the failure of democracy after 1962, referring to the revolution as being “betrayed” or “confiscated” (Vince 2015: 3)—a narrative of great expectations placed upon decolonization and their subsequent fading away. Safia Kouaci's critical view of the state's ability to care for the nation's history and to act as a custodian of a foundational past also suggests a disillusionment with the revolution's legacies. Mohamed Kouaci's photographs, then, perform a double function, as they both refer to a distant past and channel a retrospective reading of it that is shaped by postwar experiences.Sedira purposefully mobilizes the figure of the woman narrator and custodian of the past in Gardiennes d'images. By relaying a national history to Sedira and Menia, Safia Kouaci embodies the notion of the Algerian woman as preserver and guardian of culture, history, and tradition, expected to narrate the past to the next generation. As far back as in the 1930s, the ulamā, the Muslim theologian movement, identified women as key figures for the articulation of an emerging Algerian nationalism. Women were tasked with transmitting Muslim values to subsequent generations, a belief that scholars including Abdelhamid Ben Badis (1889–1940) considered integral to ridding Algerian culture of customs inimical to the Qur'an and habits acquired under the French (Lazreg 1994: 80–97). While the ulamā considered religious values as key to formulating a national identity, women's associations with nationalism exceeded well beyond this scope. Frantz Fanon's seminal 1959 essay “Algeria Unveiled” (Fanon 1965) positioned women at the heart of decolonization as it considered them as a meeting place of two competing ideologies: European colonialism and Algerian nationalism. Written in response to mass unveilings staged by the French army across several cities in Algeria the year before, during which wives of military officials both assisted in and actively unveiled selected women (MacMaster 2012: 114–51), the essay framed the Muslim veil as a symbol of a cultural identity under threat from the colonizer. The Algerian woman, then, became the guardian of values and customs that would form the basis of an independent nation. Fanon further reasserted women's implications in forming the nation-state by noting their active participation in the revolution of 1954–1962.19 For Fanon, women were “the pivot of Algerian society” (1965: 36).20 This discourse has persisted well after independence as the postcolonial state cast the woman veteran as symbol of the FLN's progressive nature and