111 | 2010

SALIMA GHEZALI

Off-Camera

In the 1990s, Algeria suffered between 100,000 and 200,000 violent deaths. This is a common way of presenting a conflict that tore the country apart, and whose unresolved questions continue to smoulder beneath the ashes. Officially the State, supported by a part of the elite, simply acted to prevent the legal overthrow of the republic by populist Islamists who had won a majority of the seats in the country’s first multi-party election.

This “resistance” to the Islamists resulted in a decade of inconceivable violence, with appalling peaks of atrocity. Always imputed to the Islamists. This facet of the war was given a reasonable amount of pictorial coverage; but there was an observed inadequacy which meant that it was regularly termed a “war without images”.

The State’s eradication of terrorism benefitted from the national consensus that sprang up as a result of Islamist extremism. There were few photographs of the operations to restore law and order. Or the bombardments, the blowing up of houses, the detention camps, the torture, the legal or “extra-judicial” executions. Is this what led to the impression of a war without images? Or was it something else?

Perhaps, between the official account of the war and the real extent of the damage, a sign of absence insinuated itself. In other words, it was not just images that the war was lacking, but sense. And this, beyond the Algerian conflict as such, may be the new alibi of war: that of combating the senseless. What produces sense for a society means nothing for those who wield power.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 111/2010, pp. 13–16.

BRUNO BOUDJELAL

Jours Intranquilles / Disquite Days

During the night of 23 September 1997, a long night of terror, more than 400 people were slaughtered. I’d often thought of going to visit this place, during my trips to Algeria. But it never happened, either from a lack of courage or from a fear of not knowing what I’d do once there. One wet April morning in 2002, without any warning, my friend Dahmane takes me to Bentalha. The sky is grey and threatening. I’m tense. All of a sudden, I see the road sign, “Bentalha”. I take a few photos through the windscreen. We drive around the district where the massacre took place. Time seems frozen, the people too. Dahmane suggests I visit one of the buildings where people were killed. We stop in front of a large, half-built block. Nobody seems to notice us: a woman sitting outside, a young girl playing behind a door or the two men who are sleeping on the ground. We go into the courtyard where nine people had their throats cut … Suddenly, a young boy comes up to us, “You have to go, the police are coming.” On the way back to Algiers, I realise we were there for no more than 20 minutes and that I took about 15 pictures, without framing them or thinking about it. Once I was back in France, for a long time I wondered whether the feeling of having been in the “heart of darkness” was simply the fruit of my imagination. It was only much later, when I developed the film from Bentalha, that I understood that what I’d imagined did exist in reality.

20 May 2002. I had a call from Algiers this morning. Dahmane’s got himself arrested. He was at the university where students were heckling Bouteflika, who was there on a visit. A large number of students were arrested. Dahmane went there to find out what had happened. Nobody knows where they’ve taken him. I’M FRIGHTENED.

(Bruno Boudjelal)

Text feature in Camera Austria International 111/2010, pp. 17–22.

OMAR D.

Devoir de Mémoire. A Biography of Disappearance: Algerien 1992 –

To provide a different image from the one presented by the power structure was the only way of giving the victims the respect they deserve. For me, putting forward another version was essential if I wasn’t to fall into the ambient schizophrenia, the huge farce staged by former non-commissioned officers in the French army, which led to more than a hundred thousand deaths, and whose aim was to shape perceptions about the real perpetrators of this tragedy.

Though calm seems to be returning, only a few voices persist in demanding the truth. A page has been turned, but the same individuals remain in power. The people, for their part, seem unable to get up off their knees, following this collective death.

After all, the Chilean and Argentinean generals of the dark years mostly died in their beds. The Abu Ghraib torturers are living untroubled lives. Why should the fate of the Algerian generals be any different? But it costs nothing to believe in the possibility of genuine international justice. It may be that, in the end, all the sacrifices will not have been in vain.

(Omar D.)

Text feature in Camera Austria International 111/2010, pp. 23–28.

RUTH SONDEREGGER

Impressions D'AFRIQUE A Not At All Personal (Travel)Story

Christian Wachter’s “Impressions of Africa” exist in two forms. As an artis’s book and in the form of an exhibition at Camera Austria that runs from 9.7. – 5.9.2010. In both cases the title is Impressions D’AFRIQUE, with capitals to emphasise “of Africa”. The night-time photograph of a burnt-out car on the cover of the book seems to underscore this. The car wreck fits perfectly to scenes in ghettoes, suburbs, banlieues and townships, that are as naturally associated with Africa as wild animals. Having regarded the images and read the captions, of course, this turns out to be a misconception: the photograph of the burnt-out car was taken in Vienna, where the photographer lives.

The first indication that the artist’s book is not simply – let alone manifestly – about Africa becomes apparent when you take a closer look at the cover. The title ImpressionsD’AFRIQUE is highlighted by the perplexing icon of a traffic sign prohibiting entry. It is as red, white and red as the Austrian flag or stop signs at borders. What is more, it is so precisely aligned with the title and the name of the author below that you might think it a kind of (punctuation) sign blended into the photograph; as if the impressions of Africa announced in the title also involve a prohibition of certain approaches. The prohibitive sign makes another appearance on the back cover of the book, where the burnt-out car is shown from a different perspective: here the no entry sign, now slightly rotated, has moved to the far right edge of the picture: no longer a blended-in sign but rather a traffic sign in keeping with the street scene. Between these poles of the book’s covers, i.e. between (possibly) blended-in signs, on the one hand, and photographs of a (possible) reality, on the other, Christian Wachter constructs and reconstructs impressions of Africa.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 111/2010, pp. 29–40.

WALID RAAD

Sweet Talk. Commissions (Beirut)

In the late 1980″s, in the midst of the Lebanese wars, I committed myself to producing photographs in Beirut.  I titled this commitment “Sweet Talk” and referred to the various photographic ­self-assignments as “Commissions”. “Sweet Talk” concentrated on Beirut”s residents, its buildings, streets, storefronts, gardens, and other objects, situations, and spaces.(1)

My ongoing commissions consist of thousands of negatives and digital files, and each was produced over a period of a few weeks to a few months, beginning in 1987. My original intention was to ­produce images in a city that was in the midst of radical urban, economic, political and social transformation. Over time, I found it increasingly difficult to print and display my images. It became clear to me that the frames I was exposing were less and less ­referential of the persons, situations, objects and spaces that faced my lens at the moment of exposure.

Throughout the last two decades, I continued to document even while great doubt surrounded what exactly was being documented.  I resigned myself to a practice that produced a record of Beirut for posterity.  Unbeknownst to me, the writer Jalal Toufic had already created in his book Forthcoming my double in the form of a ­photographer who views “things at the speed of war.”(2) Toufic”s book also outlines the seemingly futile necessity of recording that I ­instinctively and at times despairingly followed for now more than twenty years: “We have to take photographs even though because of their referent”s withdrawal, and until their referents are resurrected, they are not going to be available as referential documentary pieces – with the concomitant risk that facets relating to the subject matter might be mistaken for purely formal ones.”(3)
This encounter with Toufic and his photographer permits me ­today to present the following four plates from “Sweet Talk: ­Commissions (Beirut)”.(4)

(Walid Raad)

(1) This project was also shaped by the ending of the Lebanese wars in 1989. By 1992, the security situation had calmed enough in Beirut to ensure that a large part of the city ­became accessible to its residents in ways it had not been for the past 17 years. It was not long after this that the reconstruction of the Beirut Central District (Beirut”s ravaged downtown area) was under way, announcing within and beyond Lebanon”s borders the possible rise from the ashes of the country itself. Sadly, the country never rose from its ashes.  Instead, ashes piled up on more ashes, blood and despair as Israeli incursions and invasions never ceased; as Syria”s political, military, economic and security grip on the country tightened; as frequent bombings and assassinations paralysed the city again and again; and as the stagnant stench of political and social discord thickened and ­continues to poison the air we breathe.
(2) Jalal Toufic, Forthcoming. The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster, Los Angeles: Redcat 2009, p. 35.
(3) Toufic, pp. 30–31.
(4) One form of this project was exhibited at Camera Austria, Kunsthaus Graz between January 29 and April 5, 2010. I thank Camera Austria, Christine Frisinghelli and Andrée Sfeir for their support of this exhibition.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 111/2010, pp. 41–49.

JEFF DERKSEN

Art and Cities during Mega-Events. On the Intersection of Culture, Everyday Life, and the Olympics in Vancouver and Beyond. Part IV

Trying to track the way that the mega-event dropped down from above – like a long-lost modernist plan – and the mobilisations and counter-proposals that sprung up from community organisations, I began this series by speculating on the contestations of public space and on the forms of publicness that could emerge out of the intensification of policing and security measures that are now the kevlar-dressed symbols of mega-events. But, in the Olympic moment, new forms of publicness based on rights to housing were ultimately overridden by an older form of cultural nationalism that took to the streets. This identity-based celebration blanketed the optimistic urban mobilisations that civil society groups had set in motion long before the Games. Issues of sociospatial inequities in the city receded from the view of an imagined global public. The most visual, and visually compelling, protest – the Red Tent Campaign – which highlights the homeless crisis is an act of publicness that has endured because it also extended itself nationally.

Other acts of publicness did not go unnoticed by the heavily financed surveillance. The massive Olympic security budget was recently trumped by the 1.2 billion dollars spent on G20 security in Toronto: these two mega-events (for the G20 is a mega-event now as well) flowed into one extended security event.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 111/2010, pp. 66–67.