Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm

“An/harkie” is inscribed in the knot of legal and political contradictions that characterises the moment of the decolonisation of Algeria and its postcolonial extensions. In this context, the life trajectories of those the French government called ‘harkis’ are not limited to this state-produced category, but extend beyond what has been and is still told in the commemorations of the present time. Those who are prepared to listen to what can be said in the gaps in between official sources and lives actually lived may hear other voices and other narratives. They can also find other uses for the archives than those that doom them to maintain memory in the form of oblivion. The project initiated by psychoanalyst Sophie Mendelsohn is part of the search for fragmentary traces from which a counter-narrative can be created that may lead to proposals that might enable us to inhabit history differently.