Exhibition as a Form of Writing On “Discreet Violence: Architecture of the French War in Algeria”

• Main Author: Samia Henni
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Gothenburg 2021-06-01
• Series: Parse Journal
• Subjects: algeria; archives; colonialism; france; violence
• Online Access: https://parsejournal.com/article/exhibition-as-a-form-of-writing/

Over the course of the Algerian Revolution, or the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), the French army displaced hundreds of thousands of Algerians to militarily controlled camps called the centres de regroupement (“regrouping centers”). In April 2017, I inaugurated an exhibition titled “Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria” at the gta Exhibitions, ETH Zürich. The show displayed this massive forced resettlement, and turned a secluded facet of France’s spatial and psychological wars on Algeria’s countryside into a platform of display, giving a vivid account of military and colonial sources that are highly problematic because of their nature and the absences they hold. The show traveled to seven institutions on three continents. It consisted of texts, maps, photographs, films, and voices distributed across thirteen table display cases, nine flat screens, and three headsets, all of which was surrounded by a wallpaper of newspaper articles of 1959. In this paper, I reflect on the making of “Discreet Violence” and offer a reading of the entanglements of the sources, voices, and the display employed to tell the stories and histories of the camps. As part of my research, I suggest that this exhibition was an essential form of writing that has affordances that a published manuscript cannot accommodate. Through various voices and competing documents, this paper exposes how “Discreet Violence” disobeyed the commandment of archives and refused to accommodate the colonial domination of historical accounts and systemic marginality of groups and histories. While writing the intrinsic relationships between architecture, military measures, colonial policies, and the planned production and distribution of visual records, “Discreet Violence” criticized the rhetoric of the “civilizing mission” and the violence of the ideology of “modernity.”