![]() In it, they pay homage to the activists for restoring to millions of Berber people a long-restricted freedom of expression. Ouldamer, a native of the largest Berber region, Kabylia, co-edited a pamphlet entitled L’Algérie brûle!, attributed to ‘un groupe d’autonomes algériens’. This eventually led to the Berber mass activism and strikes of 1980, known as the ‘Berber Spring’. From this point onwards, the violent suppression of native Algerian rights by French colonists transformed into the suppression of Berber rights by the single-party leadership Front de liberation nationale (FLN) with their exclusive focus on Arabization. Between 1953, the year of ‘ The Manifesto of the Algerian Group of the Lettrist International’, and Ouldamer’s early activism came Algeria’s hard-won independence in 1962. Thus the Algerian Situationist context was well established when the next generation came to maturity. Compatriot Abdelhafid Khatib wrote a fragmentary first example of a psychogeography in 1958. Ouldamer’s presence in our copy shifts the frame of the work and provokes us to think about race, ethnicity and the Algerian crises that were part of the context of both the original publication and Debord’s subsequent gift to Ouldamer.Īlgerian intellectuals were already part of the Lettrist International, the SI’s forerunner, including Hadj Mohamed Dahou, who continued into the SI. It isn’t clear when Debord gave Ouldamer the copy, of which there were perhaps one thousand in small circulation amongst associates, but their friendship appears to have flourished in the early 1980s. | There is still a belief in this rotten “God”. Ouldamer writes: ‘It is a détournement | It was in Ecclesiastes. Inscription by Mezioud Ouldamer in Mémoires The British Library’s copy of Mémoires has an inscription by Mezioud Ouldamer (1951-2017), an Algerian political activist and author of a number of works inspired by the Situationists and his friendship with Debord. As Mémoires’ final fragment puts it, ‘I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my time’. Through his creative reinterpretation of the autobiographical genre, the author enacts the process by which the ‘society of the spectacle’ and the commodification of experience might finally be blown apart to uncover again the unique everyday amidst the alienating capitalist superstructure. ‘Guinness is good for you’: détourning advertising as the slogan is placed next to the fragment ‘in the daily struggle’ Not always ‘ supporting structures’, Jorn’s paintwork draws connections between fragments, but ‘then Debord’s words and pictures change Jorn’s avenues into labyrinths A connection is made, a connection is missed, the reader is lost, the reader enters another passageway, then another’ (Marcus, p. ![]() Wrenched from their original contexts, fragments of texts and isolated images are linked and obscured by roughly applied, bright inks. (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, thesis 208)ĭouble-page spread from Mémoires (Copenhagen, 1957 RF.2019.b.63), section 2, bright red indicating Debord’s creative energyĭouble-page spread from Mémoires section 3, fragments of maps struck through with blue lines, facing a nebulous blue splodge ![]() Détournement is the flexible language of anti-ideology. In the jargon of the Situationist International (SI), the avant-garde anti-authoritarian movement they helped form in 1957, it is a work of détournement:ĭétournement is the opposite of quotation, of appealing to a theoretical authority that is inevitably tainted by the very fact that it has become a quotation - a fragment torn from its own context and development, and ultimately from the general framework of its period and from the particular option (appropriate or erroneous) that it represented within that framework. In 1959 Guy Debord and the Danish artist Asger Jorn published Mémoires, ‘a work entirely composed of prefabricated elements’ with ‘supporting structures’ by Jorn.
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