Locked in a camp simply because of her Muslim origins, the narrator remembers. As a child, she was marked by the abandonment of her native language, Berber, which she may have spoken in Algeria, the country where she was born. His family goes to live in France. In this country, the school teaches him a new history of which he is not a part, and in another language.
Later, she will have to learn to live with another violence: the denial of diversity of the one drowned under the generic figure of the "Muslim".
This woman, now an adult, is suffocating. Cornered, she tries to flee. But the Islamic convulsion that is stirring the world catches up with her. "Muslim" you were! "Muslim" you are! She finds herself a prisoner.
In this inspired and visionary text, the first edition of which dates from 2005, Zahia Rahmani bears witness to the injunction made on us to adhere to a predetermined identity and, more broadly, she questions the making of the pariah.
This text is not without echoes of the violence that for more than three decades has struck a geographical area of the world in which Muslims and Arabs live. And for whom converging and antagonistic forces deliberately confuse and invert the terms Arab/Muslim/Arab as making only one. Thus, all diversity is erased in these territories. Inaudible. For what reasons?
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Zahia Rahmani is a writer and art historian by training. She wrote a trilogy Moze (2003) , Muslim novel (2005) and France, a childhood story (2006) with Sabine Wespieser editions. The latter received the Translation Prize for its English version published by Yale University Press in 2016. She received the Albertine Book Price in 2020 for her novel "Muslim": A novel published by Deep Vellum editions, in the United States. Head of the research area "History of globalized art?" at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA), she is currently leading the program "Paradis perdus" - Colonisation des paysages et destruction des éco-anthroposystèmes, dedicated to the emergence of iconographic and textual corpus from the Caribbean and Oceania regions. In 2010, she inaugurated with a group of young international researchers and exhibition curators the "Observatory: Global Prospective Art" meeting program, and initiated the research and exhibition project dedicated to genealogy, to the emergence and identification of hundreds of non-European critical and cultural journals. The latter is both in the form of a database dedicated to the indexing of a few thousand titled journals, sismo.inha.fr and an audio-visual installation entitled, Seismography of struggles – Towards a global history of critical and cultural journals. It has been presented in major places of contemporary art. Notably in 2018 and 2019 at RAW Material Company, Dakar; Kulte – Center for Contemporary Art in Rabat, La Compagnie, Marseille and at the Gallatin Gallery, New York University. In 2020 and 2021, at the Abattoirs de Toulouse; at the Alliance française of Cali in Colombia; at the Beirut Art Center in Lebanon and the Dakha Art Summit "Seismic Movements" in Bangladesh. In 2022 and 2023 at the MNAM Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, at the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp as part of the exhibition, "Congoville" and Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh as part of the 58th Carnegie International. From 2024 to 2025 at the Zeitz Mocaa, Cape Town, South Africa.
In 2012, she initiated the research and meeting program, "Made in Algeria – Genealogy of a territory," dedicated to cartography invention and colonial capture, which resulted in collaboration with the Maps and Plans Department of the BNF. a catalogue and a major exhibition, at the Mucem in 2016 with a workshop at the Company, Marseille.
https://www.swediteur.com/auteur/zahia-rahmani/
https://www.inha.fr/recherche/projets/histoire-art-mondialisee/paradis-perdus/
https://www.inha.fr/recherche/projets/histoire-art-mondialisee/sismographie-luttes/
https://www.inha.fr/recherche/projets/histoire-art-mondialisee/made-in-algeria/
Jean Jacques Palix is a composer, arranger, sound scenographer for installations, collector and archivist of rare music, sound hunter. Following his years of radio productions at France Culture and then at Radio Nova, of which he was one of the founders in 1981, he created his independent structure Tapage Atypique in 1985, then, in 1991, the record label Song Active, to meet his desire for a studio open to artistic, musical, and sound encounters.
He composes music for many choreographers, as well as for artists' films and documentaries. In 2002, he directed many films including "Conférence sur rien" about a reading of Eve Couturier, based on "Lecture on nothing" by John Cage. In 2007, he created 16'33', 33 homages of 30'’ to 33 composers for the gallery IN SITU/Fabienne Leclerc in Paris. In 2009, he directed the film "This disc is the same as the other one" shown at international festivals (Rotterdam International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival...). In 2010, he co-curated the exhibition "Cornelius Cardew and the freedom of listening" (Brétigny sur Orge, Stuttgart, Culturgest Porto) and directed the sound performances of "The Living Currency" in Warsaw and at the Berlin Biennale. In 2013, he composed the "Hörspiel" "TPNY Memory" on a libretto by Leyli Daryoush (broadcast France Culture). He has collaborated with Bruce Russell, Jean François Pauvros, David Linton, David Coulter, Alastair Galbraith, Vincent Segal, Paul Collins...
http://jjpalix.free.fr/bio-Palix.htm
http://jjpalix.free.fr/news.htm
https://beyond-the-coda.blogspot.com
