Algeria from East to West, 2003
“…I tried again to go wherever I could; but traveling in Algeria is, each time, a painful and difficult experience. It borders on the unspeakable. I always have the impression of falling into a bottomless pit from which I will never get out.
These comings and goings, even if I am no longer with the family, are so many links that are woven between here and there, between my history and that of Algeria, between autobiography and photography; so many crossings, so many attempts to go beyond a blurring of reality, an apparent opacity. An approach full of contradictions that oscillates between shadow and light, with also the passage from black and white to color.
In the spring of 2003, among other things, I crossed Algeria from east to west. It was an old project that I had wanted to carry out in 1993 but which I had had to renounce at the time because of the murderous madness that the country was experiencing. The trip lasted 25 days and I left from the Tunisian border to go to the Moroccan border.
This trip was geographical, of course: the mountains of Kabylia, the Mitidja plain, Algiers, the center, the Oranese … it was also an opportunity to meet the people who make this country, to see what happens to them and to know their hopes.
I also took advantage of the relative calm that the country was experiencing to go to the areas (Central region, Mitidja, Western region) where terrorism had presented its most violent forms: large massacres, arbitrary arrests, disappearances, etc. In these places, the populations were caught between the violence of armed groups, arbitrariness and the terror of state forces.
It was during this stay that I felt that my work in Algeria, at least in this form, was coming to an end. »
Bruno Boudjelal
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