In his first video essay, Ferrailles d’attente (1998), Tariq Teguia filmed in slow motion various landscapes around Algiers. The city appeared uninhabited, petrified, caught in some sort of monochromatic torpor. For his first feature film, Rome Rather Than You (2006), Teguia chose to focus on a specific banlieue that was being built at the time, La Madrague. In this gigantic, deserted, paralysed construction site, the director chronicles the lives of young men and women imprisoned in this dark and broken-down place. To set a film in a new Algerian banlieue in the 1990s is a political rather than sentimental choice: its characters are trapped in an area undermined by a hidden war, a war with no front lines. Even so, Teguia does not make his characters into caricatures or archetypes. He prefers to emphasise the persistent presence of the surroundings, to show the way walls interact with bodies, overwhelm them, block out their future …

From Scrapped Landscape to Utopian Map

In Ferrailles d’attente, a slow lateral dolly shot surveys an old ochre wall, while the soundtrack produces a ‘crumply’ sound created by sampling, as if to accentuate the fitful, confined feeling. Then great white capital letters appear on screen: ‘MACHINE À SURVIVRE’ (SURVIVAL MACHINE). An urban landscape, perpetually deconstructed, is revealed. Walls, sheets of metal, piles of wooden pallets seem to fence everything in. In his first short, Tariq Teguia exposes an architectural fault line, an architectonic chaos: steel cables lying beside the roads, houses with no roofs and no windows, rough walls striated by iron beams going up towards the sky. The loud clatter of scrap iron fills the screen, disrupts this already quite harsh urban setting. There are no words in this narrative, but the jerky movements of the camera tell their own story, just like the series of black and white photographic portraits that break up its structure, every once in a while. These silent images reveal the helplessness of the young Algerian people. Regularly, words and fragments of sentences (‘to dwell’, ‘vacant property’) appear on screen, enigmatic and alarming. The use of these metaphors (‘survival machine’, ‘what’s nicest about this place is the silence’) gives deeper meaning to these alienated, unmoving urban visions.