Editor position
La valise oubliée (The forgotten suitcase)
32 min. | Documentary | France | French
Written and directed by Kader Attia
With Françoise Vergès, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Fatima Attia
Produced by Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains & Studio Kader Attia
Three suitcases, three stories, three individual histories that interweave threads of our collective History.
Through this seemingly ordinary, even insignificant object, Kader Attia tells the story both of his family and of the anonymous actors in the struggle for Algerian independence; the thousands of nameless heroes, men and women of courage and commitment who worked in the shadows against colonialism. Whether it’s a suitcase “left behind” in the late 1950s by an unknown member of the Algerian resistance at the home of the artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, a suitcase found by chance in a Parisian street by Françoise Vergès containing photographs of her family, or the suitcase that accompanied the artist’s father on his journeys back and forth between France and Algeria, each one contains traces of a life, interwoven with a collective unconscious in which our individual dreams as passers-by are played out.
Kader Attia, born in 1970 in Dugny
Having grown up between France and Algeria, Kader Attia uses the experience of these different cultures as the basis for his intercultural and interdisciplinary approach. For many years he has explored the way societies view their own history, particularly in relation to deprivation and repression, violence and loss, and how these affect the evolution of individuals and nations, both of which are connected to collective memory. Attia’s research has led him to the notion of reparation, a concept that he has developed philosophically in his writings and symbolically in his work. Since the principle of reparation is a constant in nature – and therefore in human life – any living, social or cultural system can be seen as an infinite process of reparation, closely linked to loss and injury.
Screened at "Kader Attia: Urgency Of Existence" November 23, 2024 - March 26, 2025 at Jim Thompson Art Center.
