Oran

Margot Wallard

21 sep – 26 oct 2024
Galeria do Paço

  • Exhibitions
  • Opening Weekend
  • Legacies of Colonialism
  • Braga

Curator: Elina Heikka

Oran

“For us, Algeria was a backdrop to our many family gatherings. My grandmother, a true family pillar, referred to Algeria on a daily basis. She was obsessed with that country, to which she had never returned. Algeria never ceased to haunt her life in France. Although she hated politics, there was no bitterness in her words, rather great melancholy and love for the country.”

Granddaughter of pieds-noirs explores the family archives after the death of a grandmother and she sets off in the footsteps of her family for the first time in 2018, in a city she knows only through her grandmother’s stories. (Pied-noir, “black foot”, was what they called a person of European origin who lived in Algeria during French rule, especially one who returned to Europe after Algeria was granted independence.)

”Very quickly, I got carried away by the city and its people. I started going to one of the only cafés in town where girls and boys mix. I made friends there. Youcef, Réda, Nora, Issam, Mouaadh, who changed the course of my project and my approach to the city. From the hotel, I moved on to renting an apartment with some of them.

All my attention is focused on Oran today. When I’m there, it’s all about other people, the present moment and what people are going through. My discussions are essentially focused on the daily lives of young people and their problems. My relationship with this city is ambiguous: strong because of family memories, weak because these same memories belong to a past that doesn’t concern me directly and that Algerians want to get rid of, that no longer corresponds to their reality.

My personal, individual approach clashes with this reality and also shows me the fragility and impossibility of writing a shared history, but I’m not giving up on telling. Interactions fascinate me. It’s at once an attempt to reconstruct a personal and family history, and the history of two countries and two peoples, many times transformed, truncated or fantasised, but always destined to be shared, questioned and reappropriated by the viewer and myself.”

Galeria do Paço – UMinho
Reitoria, Largo do Paço, 4704-553 Braga

Opening Hours:

Tuesday – Saturday
10:00–12:30/14:00–18:30

Sunday and Monday
Closed