We really don’t want to hear yet another mouth uttering the old and weary truism: “In order to know where we are going, we need to know where we come from.” But can we even look at Massinissa Selmani’s videos, drawings, and photos in his exhibition 1000 VILLAGES—dedicated to the story of his own country Algeria and currently on exhibition at Index Foundation in Stockholm—without having this truism resounding in our ears like blaring evidence? We might as well cover our mouths.
Too utopian to be actualized, the original 1000 villages project was a 1970s-era grand socialist experiment that endeavored to transform Algeria’s rural landscape into a new model for society. The project never became a reality—not completely, at least.
Only a small number of the 1000 villages were actually built, but the ambitious project as a whole somehow just disappeared from the collective memory. It is precisely this interplay between reality and what remained stuck in the nation’s collective imagination that interests Selmani, who focused his exhibition around a relatively prosperous time of optimistic construction and nationalist unity for North Africa. These national interactions between the imagined and the real, the present and the absent, have become the hallmark of Selmani’s approach.
Like the subject of his work, Selmani’s path has not been a straightforward one. “As a child, I drew a lot and dreamt of attending the School of Fine Art, but in the context I grew up in, my parents preferred I’d study for a real job, so I did computer science in school, studying how to code databases,” he shares. He’s speaking to me from his studio in Tours, France, where he moved to attend the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts after studying coding in Algeria.
