Born in Gennevilliers, north-west of Paris, Zineb Sedira spent her childhood developing her love of cinema and learning about cultural differences, their richness and difficulties. In 1986 she left to study in England, where she has lived ever since. Drawing on her own vast heritage, she evolved an autobiographical practice around questions of individual and collective memories and identity. In 2002 she was first invited to Algeria in a professional capacity, a turning point in her artistic practice.

From the beginning of her career, she has developed a polymorphic practice, borrowing in turn from autobiographical narrative, fiction and documentary.

For several years her work has been moving away from memory towards more universal questions, extending notions of colonisation to economic and human flows, and more broadly, to the circulation of ideas.

Yasmina Reggad : We created aria (artist residency in Algiers) in 2011. This was the start of our collaborations and it proved to be fertile ground for discoveries and knowledge exchange. It fostered a unique rapport between us, culminating ten years later in the French Pavilion. Your work has been going back and forth between the United Kingdom, France and Algeria for two decades now. How does aria fit into this?

Zineb Sedira : I consider aria to be an extension of my artistic practice. This artist residency anchors my work more permanently in Algeria. It’s also the HQ of my extended Algerian artistic family. I sometimes include the work of an artist supported by aria in some of my exhibitions, or we collaborate more directly on the development or the making of works. In fact, we will see some of these fellow artists in my project for the French Pavilion.

Yasmina Reggad : Is putting the city of Algiers on the map of international artistic centres of production an attempt to recreate the conditions of and offer a contemporary take on the Algiers of the 1970s, the ‘Mecca of revolutionaries’? Indeed, your new work is situated in this context of intellectual and political ferment, a time when activists from all over the world met in Algeria to debate, extend the frontiers of the struggle, and invent new futures. With that in mind, your new work brings together your allies, the emotional and intellectual family that has been with you and supported you throughout your career, and which embodies its various stages, from research to the production and exhibition of the finished work.

Zineb Sedira : My apprenticeship in collaboration began with my family—my mother, my father and my daughter—and it materialized in my earliest video works. It was only in 2006 that I started shooting and travelling with a professional crew, sharing unforgettable moments of creative exchange and political discussion, especially in Algeria and Mauritania. My inner circle has remained the same for many years, and these are lasting friendships. Sharing unique experiences, discoveries and ideas is needed to make up for the isolation of the studio and to move forward. These alliances and this second family are what drives my artistic development. It’s therefore natural that my project should echo this genealogy and that I should seize the opportunity of this Venetian adventure to surround myself yet again with former collaborators and contributors.

Yasmina Reggad : Your passion and longing for cinema only came to the fore during your solo exhibition A Brief Moment at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2019. For the French Pavilion you’ve chosen to look at a major turning point in world history through the lens of cultural, intellectual and avant-garde production, focusing on the seventh art and unexpected collaborations between France, Italy and Algeria, a repertoire on which you draw for your project. Where does your passion for cinema – militant cinema in particular, come from?

Zineb Sedira : When I talk about the cinema of this era, I’m talking about the films of my childhood in the 1960s, and about my father. It was with him that I often went to the cinema Les Variétés in Gennevilliers (no longer around). There we saw Egyptian films, but it was the Italian epics and Spaghetti Westerns that had the greatest impact on me. Gennevilliers is a crucial stage in the realisation of this project, and I recently filmed my parents in the Jean-Vigo cinema. Later, when I first visited the archives of the Algerian Cinémathèque in 2017, I discovered the country’s rich cinematic heritage, which is hardly acknowledged when it comes to the history of the medium’s avant-gardes. The films that were made following independence abided by Third World values and aesthetics—a true revolution on the big screen. I felt close to this militant and anti-colonial approach, inspired by the Cuban model and testifying to the political courage of certain directors. In my new project, it was important for me to remind people that in France and particularly in Italy, directors (co-)produced films that supported and conveyed ideas developed in the Third World. As a result, I consider these co-productions to be among the most important manifestations of the solidarity advocated at the time, and that I’m trying to rekindle today.

For over two decades, Zineb Sedira has been employing photography and film, in all of its expanded formal dimensions, to explore the surviving traces of a number of controversial histories that still haunt our present realities. We first came across Zineb’s work in 2008. Where and when exactly doesn’t really matter. What does is the artwork that we saw: The Lovers: Death of a Journey (2008), a haunting image of two floating boat carcasses resting, like two humans, against one another–a couple broken by the passage of time and the eroding force of a relentless sea. Zineb made this photographic work while on an expedition to the edges of the Mauritanian coast, a geographical area marked by the daily departures, but also the gruesome returns, of bodies of young Africans to Europe. In its embodiment of a painful history, the work compelled us to acknowledge the realities of an ongoing crisis.

The urgency and unflinching humanity with which Sedira embraced her subject made it clear that it was only a matter of time before our paths would cross again and that we began working together. This happened two years later with End of the Road (2010), which we originally commissioned for Told – Untold – Retold, the inaugural contemporary art exhibition of Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. Photographic images of old broken cars, framed within Zineb’s signature light boxes of various sizes, were accompanied by a two-channel film, in which we witness the annihilation of the cars as they get swallowed up by an unstoppable grinding machine. By means of an underlying narration told in her own voice, Zineb draws attention to the detritus of globalization, bringing the personal and the universal together in a work that is as much political as it is visual.

Since then, our collaborations with Zineb have taken several forms, as we witnessed film take on a more prominent place in her multifaceted practice. Central to what she does is the overlapping of histories, objects and locations mined from extended periods of archival research and creative reflection. Moved by a desire to chart the present, she uncovers the persistent remains of historical struggles with the precision of an archeologist and the curiosity of a detective. Shaped as she is by her family experience of emigrating from Algeria to France, her growing up in Paris and eventually moving to England in 1986, Zineb has a critical grasp of the annals of history. She conflates the personal with the collective, action with immobility, and fiction with reality. Her work addresses a number of pressing issues, ranging from the critique of colonial legacies to the ongoing debate about integration, mobility and globalization. Zineb does not shy away from the tensions of a highly political present, yet her eye remains cast on a future with infinite possibilities.

In line with the major strands of her practice to date, Zineb has envisioned an immersive installation that transforms the entire space of the French national pavilion. Blending fact with fiction, she employs the strategies and tools of filmmaking, to create an environment where the fault lines that distinguish the past from the present are blurred. Drawing on significant films from the diverse repertoire of cinema from the 1960s, notably the militant strand where film production in Algeria played a central role, Zineb revisits various scenes to reformulate a multitude of narratives that have been long associated with the discourse surrounding de-colonization and its various strategies. In this staged universe, Zineb conceives the pavilion’s architecture as an extension of the projected image. She confronts the often-uncontested reliability of the archival record with the open-ended possibilities of storytelling, to query how film is entwined with politics.

As societies across the globe face the repercussions of unforgiving political and historical struggles, often the remnants of contested legacies, Zineb approaches her project for the French pavilion as a tribute to the individuals and communities who opened up the possibilities of cinema to point out, and in many ways dismantle, the yoke of colonial tyranny. Her exhibition is an invitation to recognize these cinematic milestones, some of which she has rescued from obscurity, after they were believed to have been lost for decades. But it is equally so a cautionary tale about the failure of the emancipatory promise which, for many people remains an unrealized dream. It is somewhere in between the ever-shifting gains and losses between the two, achievement and defeat, that Zineb’s imagined pavilion exists and resists…