Bruno Boudjelal — Détours-Retour
Galerie d’Exposition, Arsenal – Cité musicale de Metz
3 avenue Ney, 57000 Metz
From November 25 2021, to February 25 2022
‘In May 1993, I went to Algeria for the first time to carry out a photographic report on Algiers. It was the first time I set foot in the land where my father was born and of which I knew nothing until then. Indeed, my father is Algerian and my mother is French, but my Algerian origins have always been hidden from me and, until sixteen years ago, I had never met my father’s family. I only knew my father’s birthplace, which I had rapidly read in the family record book, but that was enough to find them one day in May 1993, in a small village in the region of Sétif, where a row of crying women greeted me with a chorus of ‘youyous’! This first contact – in spite of the emotion of the gathering – took place under difficult conditions linked to the current situation in the country: Madani de Belhadj’s preaching at the so-called Afghans’ mosque in Belcourt, attacks and murders perpetrated on all foreign nationals, a climate of suspicion and insecurity, “ninjas” roaming the streets of Algiers… It was therefore quite natural that, in addition to the quest for identity, I should also take a documentary look at Algeria, which I was discovering at the time and beginning to photograph.’
Bruno Boudjelal
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Hôtel Paul Delaroche
58 rue Saint Lazare, 75009 Paris
+33 1 53 01 85 85
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