Following conventions in metropolitan France, colonial Algiers was a city of posted proclamations. During the war for independence, officially declared in 1954, posters supporting “French Algeria” transformed buildings into agents of propaganda. Counterclaims by the National Liberation Front advocating Algeria’s independence were scrawled on walls throughout the city, and later aggressively contested by the far-right Secret Army Organization’s own poster campaign. New housing estates were animated by painted inscriptions and more fleeting actions, from choreographed illuminations to coordinated choruses from apartment balconies. Here Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of the ephemeral provides a critical framework for understanding how urban spaces were given multivalent meanings. Such ephemeral tactics challenged the logic of buildings designed as structures of containment to reimagine them as sites of collective resistance. These performative interventions served to actively produce a conjectural space, one in which it became possible to envision a different future for the city and its residents.
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