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| Attia Kader Born in 1970 in Dugny, France. Lives and works in Berlin. Rochers Carrés I am interested in the way architecture and urbanism have an impact on peoples’ everyday life, and particularly the way power has used them to control populations. One of the most famous politicians using such methods was Napoleon III. Afraid of a new revolution, Napoleon asked Baron Haussmann to redesign the capital’s urbanism. Baron Haussmann created wide boulevards, linking neighborhoods and surrounding Paris, to protect it against fortifications (shantytowns) around the capital. The poorest populations were already separated from Paris by a boundary that still exists in the banlieues: Boulevards Périphériques, each one called after a marshal’s name. During the 30s, 40s and the 60s immigrants were placed in shantytowns as soon as they arrived in France. When the overpopulation of the shantytowns made life unbearable, social and health authorities placed families in public housing, constructed by concrete; that became the banlieues, or “open sky jails”, as they are referred to by locals. In Algiers, like in Paris, Baron Haussmann had a strong influence on urbanism. Additionally, an architect in Algiers named Fernand Pouillon built experimental houses and attempted to create the first form of social progress. He loaned his name to what is now “Cité Pouillon”, a collection of buildings that resemble the French concrete banlieues by their austerity and their absence of identity. In Algiers, near the Bab el Oued neighborhood, there is a beach that young people nickname "Rochers Carrés". It looks like a breakwater beach that is made out of huge concrete blocks, whose sides can be up to 3 or 4 meters, which face the sea. Until the age of sixteen I spent my summer vacations in Bab el Oued, one of Algiers’ poor neighborhoods, where young people go to hangout, smoke, fish and sometimes prostitute themselves. Above all, they spend hours, sitting on the blocks, watching, as if hypnotized by boats going back and forth between Algeria and Europe. This beach is the ultimate boundary that separates them from this continent but above all from their dreams about a better life. This massive and strange construction imprisons them in their cruel reality, as it is also the case in French banlieues, where many immigrants end up. As time goes by, I find it ironic to have grown up in the middle of concrete buildings of Parisian banlieues, and to have frequently spent my summer vacations playing on this beach’s blocks, also made out of concrete. The series of oversized photographs taken at Rochers Carrés shows a powerful visual and psychological landscape. It offers a mythological representation of the utopian world these young people imagine. The ones, who risk to cross the Mediterranean Sea and often perish on makeshift boats, the Harragas, often state: "I would rather be eaten by fishes than by worms”. Halam Tawaaf Tawaaf means the walking around the Kaaba, the big black cube, set with a meteorite, in the heart of the Big Mosque of Mecca, and a pole, towards which Muslims from all over the world turn to pray. The work is a 5 meters diameter circle of beer cans, put on the floor, which turns in a anticlockwise movement, symbolizing the march of pilgrims, who have to turn 7 times around the Kaaba to accomplish the Mecca pilgrimage. All the beer cans are bent at a 25° angle, like Muslim people praying, and looking at the same "direction" (not towards the center of the circle but ranged each ray of the circle). I aim at speaking about Islamic ancestral culture and its applications in the contemporary social environment of young people from the banlieues in France, or other countries in Europe from Islamic background. The luckless, both victims of poverty and lost, have fallen into a desperate life… Many of them, after a tough childhood, lose themselves into drug addictions and die by Aids or overdose. A lot of junkies use as a substitute of drugs strong bad beer. As alcohol is a strong symbol of sin in Islam, some of them find in Islam the way out of their tunnel, and paradoxically most of them become extremely fundamentalist... This work is about both a mystical and metaphysical tradition from ages and its mutation in our contemporary society. The beer cans, because of the anthropomorphic shape they take, are both assimilated to pilgrims and damned people, to the infinite circle of Man forgetting himself in passive behaviors, like addictions to drug, alcohol. Kader Attia  Download CV |  Rochers Carrés, 2009 Halam Tawaaf, 2008 |
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