Koulounisation

When he visited Algiers in 2018, actor Salim Djaferi toured book shops there in search of books about the Algerian War. Surprisingly, he was unable to find anything. He was eventually told that books about this subject are categorised as being about ‘Revolution’. A war for some people and a revolution for others: are two different words used to define the same historical event on either side of the Mediterranean? The actor was concerned and eager to understand, so he questions witnesses and family members, consults books and archival documents, collects stories, listens to anecdotes, lists words used to tell them, analyses semantics and the ideology that is conveyed. This powerful story is the second production by the actor and mixes reporting, personal storytelling and historical investigation. He opts for a pared-back approach, a performance with a comedic undertone and symbolism that contrasts with the violence of the facts that are recounted through the distance he creates. Through his phonetic and linguistic investigation, Salim Djaferi retraces Franco-Algerian history and, in doing so, remedies its unfair absence from our history books.