L'Algérie, clos comme on ferme un livre ?

L’Algérie, clos comme on ferme un livre ?

With this title, loan to the lyrics of the Algerian hymn, Bruno Boudjelal highlights a story which is his as it is the story of contemporary Algeria. Without a doubt, we need to understand through this “ closed, as we close a book? ” a slow proceed of intimate questioning for the artist who has finished the appropriation of his personal history to converge to the present of a complex country.

It is now possible to travel in Algeria and Bruno Boudjelal took this new liberty to explore the country of his origins from east to west, in a stiking road movie where he crossed the path of the ghost of Frantz Fanon as young clandestine migrants on the road to Europe. A photographic story whose singular colors referred to the doubts of a people.

“We don’t know by which subtle gap but the travel between France and Algeria is an impossible journey. The perspective is wrong. The look will always be opaque. It is necessary to change radically the scale, don’t ask questions to photography, but simply to examine what emerges at the rhythm of transport. Instead of Mediterranean clamor, we can only find silence and light. In the capture of this mutism reveal a perspicacious analysis of contemporary Maghreb. Every characters of this drama are affected by the same virus : boredom. At each step of this journey, the same events are happening again and again to finally become one. The present impose itself in this immobility with an inescapable characteristic that nothing dislocates. It takes place by itself by intern necessity. A world comes to its end but does not closed.”

François Cheval

Author : François Cheval
Publisher : Le Bec en l’air
Release Date : 2015
ISBN : 978-2-36744-063-7
Book size : 22,5x29cm
Language : French et English
160 pages

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