Recover,amplify,reimagine: Transnational solidarities and anticolonial utopias in Dreams Have No Titles by Zineb Sedira

Abstract

This article analyses Dreams Have No Titles (2022), a multidisciplinary and immersive installation by UK-based, French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira. Commissioned for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, the project takes inspiration from the anticolonial and self-determining spirit of early post-independent Algeria, as well as activist films co-produced in the 1960s, 70s and 80s between Algeria, France and Italy. Following the multidirectional character of Sedira's work, this article first offers an overview of the installation and the many cultural references it contains. It then looks at the artist's mobilisation of personal narratives of migration and diaspora in relation to previous forms of cultural and political struggle, highlighting the cross-temporal and transnational effects of colonialism, but also many forms of resistance to it. It also explains how Dreams Have No Titles amplifies learnings from internationalist filmmaking in Algeria, especially through the prisms of relationality, solidarity and imagined possibility. Finally, the article discusses how Dreams Have No Titles reactivates utopias and political communities through strategies of mise en abyme, audience engagement, multi-platform referencing and do-it-yourself techniques, opening up paths for the production and transmission of transnational, cross-generational sociopolitical knowledge.

In early 2020, renowned UK-based, French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira was commissioned to develop work for the French Pavillion at the 59th Venice Biennale. The first artist of African and Algerian descent and the fourth woman to be chosen to represent the nation at the event, Sedira interpreted the decision as ‘a strong signal to change the international “image” of the French contemporary art scene as well as a form of “reconciliation” with the country's now multi-generational immigrant community’ (Boas, 2021). ¹ In the months that followed, Sedira was the target of defamatory accusations and attempts to overthrow her nomination (Harris, 2020); in the meantime, the artist herself was delving into the world of Algerian filmic co-productions, figuring out a way to explore postcolonial resistances and political solidarities in her own work. The result was Dreams Have No Titles (2022), a multidisciplinary and immersive installation focused mostly (but not only) on politically engaged films made in the 1960s, 70s and 80s between Algeria, France and Italy, and which received a special mention from the Biennale's jury.

Drawing inspiration from the anticolonial and self-determining spirit of early post-independent Algeria, Dreams Have No Titles invites audiences to recognise and celebrate historic forms of solidarity across the so-called North-South global divide, to reflect on what emancipatory promises and practices have achieved in the past, and to consider what liberation struggles mean today. To do so, Sedira creates and recreates films and set designs that blend autobiographical, fictional and documentary narratives, and plays with notions of authenticity and mise en abyme to evidence shared histories and different positionalities. By reactivating audiovisual archival materials and putting them in relation to her own experiences of (un)belonging, migration and diaspora, Sedira shows how filmmaking and film-watching can simultaneously become a space for understanding the continuous effects of colonialism and for establishing intercultural solidarities. She also prompts audience engagement on various fronts, highlighting the importance and urgency of transnational and cross-generational modes of knowledge production and transmission.

A backstage tour: Sedira's filmic references

An extensive multimedia installation, the complete version of Dreams Have No Titles contains several film sets and a film projection that consolidate a large number of cultural, geographical and historical references. Most of the project's conceptualisation happened during the global COVID-19 pandemic, in collaboration with film archive consultants based in Algeria, France and Italy, and drawing on research carried out by the artist in previous years. Despite travel restrictions, Sedira was able to visit some film heritage sites throughout the period and, according to her, the ones that left the deepest impression were the Cinecittà studios in Italy ² and the archive repositories at the Algerian Cinemathèque (Reggad and Sedira, 2022). These places and experiences formed the conceptual and visual inspiration for Dreams Have No Titles: The uncanny nature of deserted film sets before or after shooting, or when access to these spaces had to be regulated; the extensive storage and preservation work done by these film-based institutions; and interpreting ‘backstage’ structures as works of art in their own right. Dreams Have No Titles then turned these moments of solitude and Sedira's personal compilations into collective spaces where a less-known history of cinema is considered under a multidirectional approach – one where memory is ‘subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrowing’ (Rothberg, 2009: 3). My in-person experiences of the artwork happened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in February 2024, and I was indeed almost always surrounded by other visitors: Constantly aware of how, despite sharing the same space, all of us were observing and interacting with the artwork in different ways.

As with most installations of the full project, the first room at the Whitechapel Gallery contained a reproduction of the bar set of Le Bal (1983), an Italian, French and Algerian co-production. Directed by Italian filmmaker Ettore Scola, the film has no dialogue; instead, it goes through fifty years of French cultural and political history through snapshot, choreographed flashbacks in a dance hall. Starting in 1936 with the celebrations of the French Popular Front's electoral win, the film also includes fantasy portrayals of historical moments such as the raids during the Second World War, France's liberation from Nazi occupation, the American influence during the Marshall Plan years, episodes of violence during the Algerian War of Independence, and the student protests of 1968. At certain points during the day, Le Bal's film set in Dreams Have No Titles is re-enchanted with a performance by two tango dancers, who reenact a scene from the film where a French woman dances with an Algerian man. This can be interpreted as a nod to Sedira's cultural background, but also to the film's theatrical origins, since it was an adaptation of a piece devised by Jean-Claude Penchenat for the Théâtre du Campagnol. ³ The dancing act is also an emblematic reminder of the transdisciplinarity of Sedira's œuvre, of her engagement with notions of performativity throughout her career, and of her focus on playfulness and joy in her more recent works.

Surrounding the set of Le Bal there are also transport cable boxes, a sign with the project's title, lighting equipment and vintage seats, blurring the boundaries between what can be considered backstage and the installation space itself. This is reinforced by the three installation areas right behind Le Bal's set: An improvised dressing room and table, containing some of Sedira's outfits and makeup; a small band stage with microphones and musical instruments; and a green screen area, which contains a maquette of Sedira's living room, some suitcases, and a typewriter with a quote by Frantz Fanon. The extract reads: ‘Let's banish from our land all racism, all forms of oppression and work toward the development of man and the enrichment of humanity’, and is an English adaptation of Fanon's speech Pourquoi nous employons la violence, given at the Accra Positive Action Conference in 1960. ⁴ Fanon's involvement with the Algerian struggle for independence is seen by many as an exemplary practice of internationalist anticolonialism and Pan-African solidarity; his Accra address was later published in reprints of L'an V de la révolution algérienne, furthering the connections between his analyses of Algeria and of Africa (Bessone, 2011: 32–33). Situating this quote within Fanon's work also allows us to build a bridge between Sedira's installation and Fanon's writings on cultural dynamism, as well as on the (envisioned) structural transformations from the Algerian revolution.

Upstairs, the next film set showcased a domestic setting from the famous The Battle of Algiers (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and co-produced by the only independent film company in Algeria at the time, Casbah Films. Algeria's first post-independence production to get widespread international recognition, The Battle of Algiers was a fictional film that was nevertheless celebrated for its documentary style and attention to historical detail. The set in Dreams Have No Titles references a scene where three fidayate (women urban fighters, ‘fire carriers’ and martyrs) gather at home to ‘unveil’ themselves and adopt European dress; later on, performing this Europeanness, they would plant bombs in the French Quarter of Algiers. Sedira's version of the bedroom set is infiltrated by her own family pictures, and also contains a camera and a live streaming equipment where audiences can watch themselves in real time. Much has been written about the film, its women characters, and that particular masquerading scene; in the context of the installation, it is perhaps useful to highlight analyses that call attention to women's subjective and often ambivalent experiences of anticolonial nationalism, questioning the depth of their portrayals in relation to their historical contributions (Amrane Minne, 2007; Moore, 2003; Roberts, 2007). Scholars have also argued that the filmic sequences focused on the fidayate in The Battle of Algiers play with notions of access to images and information, simultaneously creating a position of complicity in the audience and breaking illusions of voyeuristic observation (Virtue, 2014: 330–331), and inviting us to consider ‘the medium as manipulative and multiply interpretable’ (Khanna, 2008: 119).

The exhibition continues to a room with a set design sketch and a wooden coffin. On the wall, a small sign explains that it refers to Lo Straniero (1967) by Luchino Visconti, also a French-Italian-Algerian co-production. Based on the homonymous novel L’Étranger by Albert Camus, the film has colonial Algeria as a backdrop and touches on themes of dissonance, guilt and indifference through the story of the French settler Meursault, who murders an unnamed Arab man. Lo Straniero is considered ‘unsuccessful both from critical and commercial points of view’, offering ‘a European ethnocentric view of colonization’ and ‘presenting an Algeria where Algerians were erased’ (Bedjaoui, 2020: 120). However, as Markus Messling and Jonas Tinius (2023: 8) highlight, its inclusion in the artwork's assemblage of film sets insists on questions around selective mourning and grief, as well as on the role of those who mourn in this process of remembrance.

The set of Lo Straniero is followed by a room with an old editing deck, surrounded by film cannisters and with film rolling sounds echoing in the background. Besides various film titles, cannister labels mark the passing of time in the cinema industry: They showcase different types of film strips (for example, copie standard, copie muette, version anglaise, négatif son V.F. mono, numérique noir et blanc) and two important French institutions for cinema preservation – the public Archives Françaises du Film and the private studio Éclair Laboratoires. The exhibition label on the wall states that this set is a reference to F For Fake (1973), a docudrama by Orson Welles and a French-German-Iranian co-production. Welles’ essay-like film addresses notions of authorship, authenticity and value in art by exploring the career of Elmyr de Hory, a professional art forger. Sedira's choice of film set, however, corresponds to the moments in which Welles himself appears on screen, in a film editing suite. This elicits reflections around self-representation and the process of film montage, which again are common themes in Sedira's artistic trajectory.

The upstairs floor of the installation also includes an Orientalist tapestry on the wall titled Parents Wall Rug, and a life-size diorama of Sedira's own living room in London, titled Way of Life. Highlighting the intersection of the personal and the political, these two works call for a reflection on the impact of intimate spaces, of identitarian stereotypes and of hospitality in activist cultural production. In the living room's television set, a video interview with artist Sonia Boyce and curator Gilane Tawadros plays in a loop, with an off-frame Sedira sometimes adding her voice to the conversation. They discuss, amongst other things, their experiences of prejudice and solidarity in Brixton and London, as well as the efforts made by African, Asian and Caribbean diasporic artists to carve space and create forms of resistance in the British art scene. This video is emblematic of some of Sedira's conceptual points with the installation – namely, that film can (and should be) be a space of conviviality, and that at the heart of her artistic practice are informal knowledges and unnoficial narratives.

Remaking and reconnecting: Continuums of violence and resistance

While the immersive and backstage-like character of the film sets is definitely able to spark curiosity in the audience about the content and context of their corresponding cinematic productions, the many rooms can also generate a sense of disorientation. Audiences without prior knowledge of the films or of Sedira's artistic trajectory might have questions about processes of creation, authenticity and authorship, and the set reproductions with minimal verbal referencing indeed add to that feeling. However, everything comes together in the final room: Screened in a loop, in a cinema area with red velvet vintage seating, is Sedira's own film. As she explains, the film was not scripted, but came together in the editing process as a ‘puzzle of stories’ stitched together by her voice-over (Judah, 2022). In the film, the mysterious clues and invisible connections throughout the set designs form a coherent yet open narrative, one which mixes Sedira's personal experiences and passion for cinema with the potentiality and political thinking from past activist films. Audiences are given more information to understand why these films were selected by her, and can begin to reflect on what they can teach us about the present.

We understand, for example, that in Dreams Have No Titles the set of Lo Straniero stands for the feelings of unbelonging that permeated Sedira's and her siblings’ childhoods and adolescence. In her film, Sedira reflects on the context in which she grew up – council housing in Parisian suburbs, traversed by issues with drug addiction, police blunders and suicides – and speaks about a mal-de-vivre rooted in the conflicting identities that surrounded her – Algerian, French, Arab, Muslim, Berber. The artist gives us more context about her parents’ seemingly out-out-place Orientalist tapestry, explaining how it was ‘sold as a sample of their homeland’ and how, to her, it represents ‘an awakening into feminism, fantasies of women in roles and places fixed in time.’ We also learn that Sedira's encounter with The Battle of Algiers only happened in London in the early 1990s, since the production was not shown in France until 2004. Sedira explains that The Battle of Algiers was the ‘start of many questions and discussions’, hinting at how the production was not just a meaningful reference for her, but also an important challenge to French perceptions of Algerian resistance.

Sedira's film is also permeated by several extracts from Les Mains Libres (1965), the first Algerian documentary film (and the first feature-length film in colour) post-independence (Peretti, 2022a, 2023). Also produced by Casbah Films, Les Mains Libres had fallen into oblivion until it was rediscovered by Sedira and others in the archives of AAMOD (Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico) in Italy, and restored in partnership with the Cineteca de Bologna. The documentary opens with the same Fanon quote used by Sedira in the green screen room of her installation, and addresses the development of the Algerian struggle for independence as well as the country's challenges after that. In Dreams Have No Titles, Sedira juxtaposes scenes from the original film, which show Algerians returning to their homeland from France, with her own performance; according to her voice-over, they are ‘a reenactment of [her] family's script, as colonised and immigrants; stories of dreams and rude awakenings.’ This alludes to Sedira's own experiences of migration – a daughter of Algerian immigrants in France, she later also emigrated to the United Kingdom – but can also be interpreted as her process of (re)connection with Algerian cultural memory through research and art-making.

Sedira's affective, family-related experiences also inform her deep engagement with film as a medium. When she was a child, her father – an illiterate factory cleaner – used to take her to the cinema in Gennevilliers to watch spaghetti westerns and Egyptian epics (Adams, 2024). In Dreams Have No Titles, she recalls these episodes as the beginning of her ‘love story with cinema’, explaining how watching films was a shelter and an escape, a place where she felt ‘grateful, privileged and content’ as a child. This sense of cinematic hospitality illuminates Sedira's selection of films for the installation in two ways. Firstly, many of the productions referenced in Dreams Have No Titles, such as The Battle of Algiers, Lo Straniero and Le Bal, mobilised Algerian locations, characters and historical episodes to chronicle diverse experiences of injustice, prejudice or cultural displacement. By relating these films to her personal life trajectory, Sedira prompts audiences to reflect on how oppressed identities can and should be represented on screen, as well as on the impact of identifying with or ‘feeling seen’ through certain narratives. Secondly, and as the artwork's title suggests, all films referenced in Dreams Have No Titles deal with the notion of fictionalisation, either as a theme (i.e., art forgeries, mimicking identities, idealised futures, recreated pasts) or as form (i.e., a docudrama, a book or memoir adaptation, acting and performance). By opening up a space where other realities and scenarios can be visualised and materialised, these films recall the potentiality and optimism of political utopias, as well as the relevance of imagination in sociopolitical struggles.

Therefore, Sedira's film at the end of the installation mobilises a personal history of migration and diaspora in relation to previous forms of cultural and political struggle, highlighting the cross-temporal and transnational effects of colonialism, but also many forms of resistance to it. Following Olivia C. Harrison (2022: 459), I argue that the artwork puts into practice a sort of ‘postcolonial anti-colonialism’: By (re)investigating the cultural productions that celebrated resistance in the couple of decades following Algerian independence, and putting them in relation to her life experiences in Paris and London, Sedira reactivates links between past and present forms of colonial oppression. Doing so, she not only highlights the continuum of violence and injustice that has endured throughout these decades, but also calls attention to modes of solidarity that can and should persist, albeit adapted to new circumstances. ⁵

Learning from and with internationalist filmmaking in Algeria

In this sense, the artwork's focus on internationalism and on the Algerian cultural context is particularly important. Although Sedira developed Dreams Have No Titles under an invitation to represent France at the Biennale, her ‘approach was to look beyond one specific country so as to question the very notion of nationhood’ (Tapponi, 2022). This is relevant for two reasons. Firstly, by spotlighting Algerian filmic co-productions at the French pavilion, Sedira hints at the impossibility of representing contemporary French identities and cultures without addressing its constitutive history of Empire. This symbolic act adds to a body of scholarly and creative works that has problematised French (and the Biennale's) universalism, and which have also ‘illuminated the ways in which Algerian decolonization constitutively shaped “postwar” French cultural memory and political institutions’ (Jarvis, 2021: 12). However, by not focusing exclusively on the French-Algerian cultural nexus, Sedira refuses to reproduce the colonial fixation on binaries: In Dreams Have No Titles, the two cultures are not merged or hierarchised, but co-exist as ‘interrelated, yet distinct, histories’ (Shilton, 2013: 9) amongst others. Sedira's decision also nuances monolithic views of the imperial West, echoing ‘the emphasis many anticolonialists placed on connection: (…) on relinking a dispersed political community’ (Reza and Musab, 2023: 227–228). From an Algerian perspective, Sedira's multidirectional approach is also particularly important to circumvent the Algerian state's monopolised mythologisation of the liberation struggle (Austin, 2012: 20, 55; Crowley, 2022: 630), and to avoid the conflation of Algerians and its cultural production with state-managed industries.

Sedira's decision feels even more poignant given that Algeria has never had its national pavillion at the Biennale. The first attempt, at the 58th edition in 2019, was cancelled after heavy criticism from artists and professionals, who denounced the Algerian government's censorship, favouritism and lack of accountability, and highlighted the tensions between international visibility and lack of support for a local industry (Bouzidi, 2019). Sedira's thematic focus on Algeria is therefore emblematic of the importance and role of diasporic artists for Algerian cultural production, in particular those living and/or working in France, since they often maintain strong formal and affective connections to the country but can manage to develop work outside Algerian nationalistic frames or its cultural-political apparatus. However, it is also a reminder of the influence and power of external actors – especially French – in the Algerian cultural milieu. This form of indirect authority responds to and results in a relatively poor arts infrastructure in Algeria, especially in relation to the visual arts and film. As Natasha Marie Llorens (2019: 17) points out, ‘the government's neglect of the arts not only affects the opportunity to exhibit within Algeria, it also impacts the intellectual infrastructure for critical debate about the function and value of art’. Walid Benkhaled (2016) also highlights that the current absence of cinema distribution circuits in Algeria and a reliance on external funding schemes limits directors’ control over their productions, which can lead to heavy distancing from the Algerian realities they seek to represent. This prompts questions around what kinds of framings of Algerianness are circulated to global audiences, and what narratives are considered acceptable, interesting or successful to the international arts market – of which the Venice Biennale is perhaps the most celebrated example.

However, Sedira's focus on cinematic productions from the 60s, 70s and early 80s brings us back to a period where cinema and the arts were not only valued by the Algerian government, but treated as a key feature of its internal and foreign policies. Given the country's multilingualism and high illiteracy rates, cinema had been used by the French as a colonial tool for propaganda; in post-independence Algeria, it was reappropriated as a way to assert the country's emancipation and self-determination, as well as to build a homogeneous national identity (Armes, 2005: 7–8; Austin, 2012: 20–21; Khanna, 2008: 107). The Algerian film industry was fully nationalised between 1964 and 1969: With the centralisation of film distribution came also a boycott from major Hollywood film companies until 1974 (Khanna, 2008: 137); and with the boycott's lifting came the peak year for cinemagoing in Algeria in 1975 (Austin, 2012: 27). 1964 was also the year in which the Algerian Cinemathèque opened in Algiers. Writing in the mid-70s, Hala Salmane (1976: 20) states that the Cinemathèque became ‘the most important in Africa, preserving thousands of prints and showing five different films every day.’ Moreover, as Guy Austin (2012: 29–30) suggests, the Cinemathèque ‘played a key role in generating an Algerian film culture that was both domestically and internationally embedded, as a screening space, a venue for film seasons and festivals, and as a member of the International Federation of Film Archives.’

Therefore, the Cinemathèque exemplifies the Algerian approach to national cinema: One not contained in the nation, but as a ‘transnational cinematic enterprise’ (Peretti, 2023: 55). Since its inception during the War of Independence, Algerian cinema was a way of establishing networks of solidarity and resistance with other countries and groups. The internationalisation of images of the struggle for liberation was seen as integral part of the FLN's information campaign, especially via Western television channels (Bedjaoui, 2020). The dissident French filmmaker René Vautier is often mentioned as a key figure during this anticolonial period, but there are also several other examples of film professionals and processing laboratories from France, Italy, Yugoslavia and East Germany (Bedjaoui, 2020; Peretti, 2023). After independence, Algerian politically-engaged arts policy was also a source of inspiration to other countries and regions in Africa in their own struggles. It is important to remember that Algiers was quickly nicknamed ‘the Mecca of Revolution’ for its support and hospitality to (inter)national liberation movements (Byrne, 2016: 3), and even the militant-artists who disagreed with Algerian authoritarian forms of nationalism would find their place there ‘to write, paint, print zines, film, train militarily, laugh, make love, and debate the future of postcolonial Africa’ (Tolan-Szkilnik, 2023: 3). On a technical level, international co-productions shot in Algeria meant locations with reliable weather and cheap labour costs for extras and assistant crew (Forgacs, 2007: 353), which were an attractive deal for European partners such as Italy. On the other hand, for Algerian film companies and practitioners, these transnational deals had the potential to bring foreign expertise, training and resources to a local industry, as well as enable foreign distribution of their own stories and images.

Sedira is of course aware of these complex circumstances which make postcolonial cinema in post-independence Algeria ‘a site of ongoing conflict’ and of ‘inherent contradictions’ (Salhi, 2008: 446). As she states in an interview, she knows that ‘filmmakers went to Algeria to film because the government paid for it, but the choice to work there remained’ (Peretti, 2022b: 269, my translation). Speaking about the political utopias of the 60s, she also understands that they ‘failed at the time, but that doesn’t mean there was nothing good about it. We need to take a moment to actually look at all those political movements – there are things we can learn and adapt’ (Walton, 2023). And this is what she does, indeed: Navigating between a past in which Algerian filmmaking was frequently instrumentalised and a present in which the cultural apparatus is often neglected, Sedira's decision to focus on artistic moments of connectivity and solidarity represents an attempt to think beyond dichotomies such as progress-failure or domination-subjugation. Her film remaking strategies do not disregard cinema as a site of ‘ideological interpellation and possible exploitation’, but underscores ‘its ability to forge an imagined collectivity’ and resurrects ‘the utopian spark of cinema as an alternative public sphere’ (Balsom, 2013: 114; 123). Doing so, Sedira defies imperial fantasies of ideological purity and historical transcendence: It is not a matter of completely escaping Western models and temporalities, nor being simply co-opted by them, but of placing emphasis ‘on the productive tension between imagined possibility and lived experience’ (Sajed, 2022: 26).

Reactivating utopias, belongings and resistances

This notion of imagined possibility is a key element in understanding the political potential of Dreams Have No Titles. Sedira's autobiographical narrative and personal collection of films does not offer simple answers to questions of cultural memory in France or Algeria, nor straightforward courses of action for the sociopolitical challenges of today. Instead, the artwork is (literally) a montage of filmic references, working as an anchor to a process of ‘juxtaposition and quotation across past and present’ (Gruffydd Jones, 2019: 597). The installation opens up a space where two simultaneous feelings can emerge: An awareness of the repetition and reproduction of earlier modes of oppression under different, contemporary forms, but also a recognition and reactivation of previous forms and practices of resistance. This concurrence is important because the purpose of the installation is not to romanticise the past or glorify revolutionary ideals, nor to ignore the challenges and issues that make our current historical context significantly different. Instead, the artwork refuses to accept the past as contained and resolute, for better or for worse: It engages with the persistence of colonialism, but also with the notion that anticolonialism was not (and cannot be) seen as exhausted or irrelevant in the present.

Seen in this light, Dreams Have No Titles is therefore about understanding how the anticolonial future was imagined (and sometimes practiced) before, coming to terms with how it remains unaccomplished in its totality, and offering us ‘a source of moral and critical energy’ (Gruffydd Jones, 2019: 597) that can helps us figure out how to bring it into reality in the present. The question becomes not what these films and struggles have accomplished in the past, but what those productions and activisms can mean and teach us today. And this is where the personal element of Sedira's narrative becomes relevant in the process. As Messling and Tinius (2023: 9) explain, Sedira explores ‘the power that art and other productions of culture possess (…) to make connections between individual lives and a universal question, and thus to make possible an experience of universality from within a historically situated position.’ By sharing her personal archive of experiences, her own sources of inspiration and learning, the artist invites audiences to also form their own compilations, to do their research into the ways in which the past was and is represented, and to project their own memories and knowledge into these historical narratives.

Sedira encourages this interplay in two effective ways. The first one is by highlighting the intrinsic intertextuality of her own work, either via mechanisms of mise en abyme or of audience participation. As I have argued elsewhere (Tavares, forthcoming), Sedira's use of mise en abyme strategies throughout her career symbolise how she conceives the writing of History as an ongoing process, made up of fragmentary yet essential moving parts that require constant reevaluation. In Dreams Have No Titles, this strategy can be visualised via the ‘copy’ of her living-room installation, for example – the small, maquette-like version is showcased first, the life-size diorama appears later on, and both sets are then showcased in her film at the end. By including different versions of the same visual narrative in the exhibition, Sedira challenges temporal linearities and problematises the notion of originality, asking visitors to look again and differently at the materials on show. The opportunities for audience involvement are also key, and Sedira harnesses enjoyment as a means of critical engagement (Balsom, 2013: 124). In Dreams Have No Titles, visitors can sit at one of the tables of Le Bal's bar, see themselves in the camera included in The Battle of Algiers set, and play film editor in the set of F for Fake. These theatricalisations of the installation space have several implications (Petersen, 2015). Firstly, visitors literally enter the scene of the artwork, becoming more aware of the multisensory character of art experience and of the role of the environment in their actions. They also alternate between viewing and viewed subjects, which elicits awareness of their gaze and of their own role in the making of (fictional) realities. Moreover, the theatrical strategies create a sense of co-creation with the artist, inviting audiences to navigate and coordinate different systems of representation but also to question who has the authority to do so.

Secondly, Sedira constantly highlights the existence of an ‘outside’ to the artwork: She takes centre stage as the facilitator in the sharing of knowledge, but keeps the process open and multidirectional through sustained referencing. A good example of this is the fact that some of the films that inspired Sedira to make Dreams Have No Titles are often shown as part of the galleries’ parallel programming. At the Whitechapel Gallery, for example, the artist screened Salut les Cubains (1963) by Agnès Varda and The Pan-African Festival of Algiers (1969) by William Klein, alongside the already-mentioned The Battle of Algiers and Les Mains Libres. This allows audiences to access films that are not frequently screened in shared spaces and to draw comparisons between the artwork, its references and other activist productions from the past, painting a larger picture of the critical context in which Sedira's work is situated. In a similar vein, the exhibition catalogue was published as a kit of three pamphlet-like newspapers that bring together excerpts of critical texts, interviews, image prints, films and song lists. This multi-platform strategy allows for an amplification of Sedira's work of curation and of the political relevance of the cultural productions she selected. Being cheaper to print than usual glossy exhibition catalogues, the newspapers give her work more market reach, of course; but they do so by paying homage to those who came before her, formalising her personal archive in a way that can be more easily shared for further learning and discussion.

The exhibition catalogue is also a good example of Sedira's reactivation of do-it-yourself techniques, a strategy that she reiterates in the making of her own film. In Dreams Have No Titles, most of the performers are, in fact, her friends and family, echoing the use of non-professional actors in neorealist and Third cinemas (O’Rawe, 2023). This community assemblage has two complementary effects. On the one hand, the presence of Sedira's loved ones in her film is a way to reinforce the discussion on authenticity that she constantly invokes in the installation through the reality-fiction binary. By asking friends and family to re-enact famous scenes of oppression and resistance, Sedira gives contemporary resonance to those past filmic narratives and creates a cross-temporal link that legitimises seemingly ‘ordinary’, personal struggles to the audience. On the other hand, having her inner circle on screen is a stark reminder of the importance of a strong community to support the development of artistic projects like hers. In Dreams Have No Titles, Sedira's Pavillion curators Sam Bardaouil, Till Fellrath and Yasmina Reggad show up often in the film, playing different characters and themselves; fellow artists Sonia Boyce and Latifa Echakhch, who represented Great Britain and Switzerland respectively at the same Biennale, also make appearances on video; and many other creative friends can be seen alongside Sedira reading, dancing, singing and acting. ⁶ Aligned with the fact that Sedira also features the film crew and backstage elements throughout the project, her work with peers draws attention to the material conditions of art and film production: It conceives it as a truly collaborative process, away from economies of exploitation and stardom. The reactivation of past, activist films therefore becomes a reactivation of community, with a view of enabling contemporary artistic dialogues, intellectual exchanges, transcultural encounters and political solidarity.

Repetition as an invitation to continue

If Dreams Have No Titles is all about a back-and-forth between transnational contexts, postcolonial temporalities and (dis)connected communities, it feels relevant to go back to the first film set in the installation, the one from Le Bal, and to its reactivations through tango performances. At the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, the dancers would replay their movements and the selected scene a few times in a row, almost as if in a rehearsal. However, I see these repetitions as related to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's notion of rehearsal, based on the practice of potential histories. According to Azoulay, to rehearse is to reiterate, to reconstruct, to allow for a reactivation of ‘what others have already said, established, performed or written at different conjunctures before us, when they were subjected to different modalities of imperial violence’ (Azoulay, 2019: 44). It is not the reproduction of a model, but an exercise of disengagement from imperial temporalities, and a rejection of a past seen as closed-off and untransformable. In the context of the installation, the couple's performance can be interpreted as a refusal to maintain the potentiality of the selected films in the past, as well as to see certain activisms as failed attempts or as ‘lost causes’. Instead, these repeated choreographies are a way to consider struggles and the spirit of resistance as something always ongoing, adapting to the cultural, political and historical circumstances in the same way that imperial and colonial oppressions transform themselves.

It is very telling that Sedira opens up her installation with a rehearsal, and then does not include performers in any other rooms until we see the sets re-enchanted again in her own film at the end. It is also worth noting that the original scene of Le Bal had many other dancers on the floor, and that the corresponding actors do not appear in Sedira's film nor in the performances. This is clearly an invitation for us to fill in the gaps – one that she verbalises at the end of her film, asking us to ‘dance, dance, dance. Dancing to express yourself, no matter what. Just keep on dancing, dance to the tempo of life.’ Through her use of different media within the installation, Sedira therefore shares her personal blueprint of what to do with all these images and references, and encourages us to have the autonomy to make our own montages from archival materials. As an audience, we are invited to insert ourselves in these spaces just like she did; to move in-between geographic contexts and cultural practices; to question what we consider to be our historical reality; and to challenge imperial divisions in time, space and communities by identifying links, researching and remembering. As Sedira shows us, this is indeed a multidirectional and complex path, but one that can begin through artistic archival research, and carry on via creative, playful and shared spaces for reflection.