1000 Villages program: Make Me a Picture of the Future, with Natasha Marie Llorens

Natasha Marie Llorens will present some of the historical context for the 1000 Socialist Villages initiative in Algeria, a project that crucially borrowed heavily from a French colonial urban planning policy document called the Constantine Plan. Ostensibly, the 1000 Socialist Villages brought modern amenities and secure “rationally organized” housing to those who had been displaced from the land over generations by extractive land policies under colonial rule. Yet the Algerian government of the 1960s and 70s also sought to break the stronghold of an Algerian rural elite and centralize power in the hands of a national government by nationalizing their land for the gorund beneath the 1000 Socialist Villages. Llorens will discuss Selmani’s work as a practice that occupies the breach between competing interests. She will position Selmani as one who claims the right to opacity while simultaneously performing the crucial work of amnesis on behalf of an Algerian people.

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Natasha Marie Llorens is a Franco-American independent curator and writer based in Stockholm where she is professor of art theory at the Royal Institute of Art and co-chairs the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary with Mick Wilson. She holds an MA from the centre for Curatorial Practice at Bard College and a PhD in art history and comparative literature from Columbia University. Llorens’ writing is focused on contemporary art and film from North Africa and the Middle East. She writes about feminist and queer politics, philosophies of violence, and decolonial curatorial practices. She is working on a book about experimental films from 1960s and 1970s Algeria, a methological study of decoloniality in curating with Algiers-based curator Myriam Amroun, and an anthology of writing by foundational Algerian art historian and semiotician, Nadira Laggoune-Aklouache.

This event is part of the program for the exhibition 1000 VILLAGES with Massinisa Selmani. More information about the exhibition here.