#feministfriday episode 503 | Algeria
Good afternoon everyone,
I went to a cool exhibition last weekend, Zineb Sedira at the Whitechapel Gallery. If you are in London or can get there, I highly recommend it.
She used a lot of images of her own living room, which I really loved and wondered if I could adopt into my own life the practice of making dioramas of spaces that are important to me. She talks about that here:
I like the idea of set design, decor, and the boundaries between fiction and reality. As soon as I take something out of my home and put it into an art space, it becomes a wider story—a fiction that mixes the autobiographical with the collective.
https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/zineb-sedira-culture-is-a-way-of-resisting/A lot of the work in the show is about Algeria and the role women played in their fight for freedom. Here you can read more about early Algerian woman freedom fighter, Fatma N'Soumer:
General Randon, who did not accept this defeat, asked the inhabitants of Azazga to help him reach Fatma N’Soumer’s quarters and to end "her legend and misdeeds." The response to his emissary was to "Go to the one who sent you, and tell him our ears cannot hear the language of he who asks us to betray."
Fatima Abbadi Photography: Heroine of the resistance: Lalla Fatma N’Soumer
Lalla Fatma N' Soumer, heroine of the Djurdjura, was born in a village near Ain El Hammam in 1830, the year when the French occupied A...
The importance of culture and joy to any fight runs right through Zineb Sedira's work, so here's a review of a novel (The Mischief) by Assia Djebar:
in 1955, Djebar became the first Algerian woman to study at the École Normale Supérieure of Sèvres—one of France’s most elite educational establishments—though she was expelled only two years later for striking along with the Union of Algerian Students to protest France’s colonial rule. This was when Djebar wrote The Mischief, and although it wasn’t about the specifics of the moment, it was born from that tumult
The Paris Review - Re-Covered: The Mischief - The Paris Review
Assia Djebar was one of Algeria’s most celebrated female writers and intellectuals. But her debut, written when she was twenty-one, has fallen by the wayside.
Love,
Alex.