{"id":21501,"date":"2026-10-08T16:10:30","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T16:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diptykmag.com\/africa-constructing-the-past\/"},"modified":"2026-10-12T14:07:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T14:07:15","slug":"africa-constructing-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.diptykmag.com\/en\/africa-constructing-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"“AFRICA”: Constructing the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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At the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Contemporain (MAC) in Marseille, Louisa Babari brings together photomontages, archaeological artifacts, a slideshow, and a sound installation exploring ancient North Africa. Is this an attempt to recover a lost past? The exhibition \u201cAFRICA\u201d does something even stranger: it pieces together a past that was never whole, thereby shifting the question our times put to images. <\/b><\/p>

By Basma Mansour<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Louisa Babari, AFRICA<\/i>, 2025. Based on \u201cFragment of a Statue of a Woman<\/i>,\u201d\nConstantine, Algeria. \u00a9 Louisa Babari <\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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It all begins with the smallest historical unit there is: a proper name. Of Russian and Algerian descent, French artist Louisa Babari discovers, through the work of archaeologist Ahmed M\u2019Charek, that her surname is an ethnonym attested in North Africa since antiquity, linked to the Numidian kingdom. From this personal discovery, the exhibition traces the connection step by step\u2014from the name to the genealogy, from the genealogy to the archaeological evidence, from the evidence to Roman Africa, and from the province to the goddess Ifri or Ifru, whose name would eventually come to designate a continent. There is no \u201coriginal\u201d Africa beneath the accumulated meanings. Territories, empires, fantasies, and political geographies have settled upon the word like layers. The exhibition\u2019s title is, in itself, already a collage. <\/p>

The room brings two systems of historical knowledge face to face. In a brightly lit vestibule stand the exhibits, each labeled with its provenance and inventory number: a stele of Saturn unearthed in Skikda, a Punic glass pendant, a Roman spearhead, and, on a screen, an animated reproduction of a 3rd-century inscription in which the name \u201cAfrica\u201d appears. Then we move into the darkness, where eight enlarged photomontages on tarps pierce the gloom with their white halos, between two broken columns, a slideshow, and a twenty-five-minute electroacoustic composition that entirely invents a sonic Numidia. The stele asserts that it was once there. The collage responds that we are no longer quite sure what that<\/i> means. For these images bring together fragments of statuary cut out from old scholarly journals, Chaouia women photographed in the 20th century, contemporary silhouettes, horses, and ruins. There is no chronological purity, no reconstruction. The artist speaks of \u201cpossible visions<\/i>,\u201d assembled as intuitively as they are well-researched\u2014a way of \u201croughing up<\/i>\u201d the archive and introducing accidents into it\u2014an approach that led the philosopher and art critic Florian Gait\u00e9 to describe her, in the monograph published by \u00c9ditions AA, as an \u201canarchivist.\u201d <\/p>

This is where the exhibition diverges from a narrative that has become dominant. Much of today\u2019s practice operates according to a logic of recovery: something has been erased, we find it, we make it visible, we restore continuity. The political value of this act is real; colonization destroyed and reorganized entire bodies of knowledge. The danger lies elsewhere\u2014in the aestheticization of loss itself\u2014when the precolonial era becomes a sanctuary of integrity, an alternative origin, desirable precisely because it is imagined as intact. Babari cuts this temptation short through the very form of her images, which lay bare their own construction. Her collage stems from the observation that the image has never been whole\u2014just as the name \u201cAfrica\u201d survived antiquity only as recorded by its adversaries. Instead of restoring, it orchestrates co-presences: a ruin set against a contemporary body. The rupture between past and present remains visible; it merely ceases to be definitive. <\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Louisa Babari, AFRICA<\/i>, 2026, collage (detail)\n\u00a9 Louisa Babari<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Rejecting Nostalgia<\/b><\/p>

Yet a contradiction runs through the exhibition; it is its very lifeblood. Babari warns against nostalgia and says she wants to accept Algeria \u201cas it is today, with its ambiguities and contradictions<\/i>.\u201d Yet “AFRICA” methodically creates the visual conditions of a longing for the past: darkness, depth, lions and horsemen, mineral matter, the longue dur\u00e9e. Can an exhibition reject nostalgia while still crafting its own atmosphere? The answer may lie in the slideshow. The artist describes her photographs of statues as portraits captured in the mirror of those who gazed upon them two thousand years ago. The idea is beautiful and unstable; looking at the same object does not establish any genealogical continuity. But this is precisely what the montage assumes: continuity is not rediscovered by the work; it is produced by it. The collage creates the conditions under which a lineage becomes imaginable and demonstrates it. <\/p>

It remains to be understood why collage functions here as a method rather than as ornamentation. An image can present itself as a window; in that case, it reveals a state of the world and is judged by its resemblance to it. It can also present itself as a device, and what it produces is an arrangement of fragments whose relationships become perceptible. The Russian avant-garde made this second definition its program, in the wake of a historic rupture, when the task was to create forms capable of fostering a new consciousness. In this context, photomontage embraces its cuts and dispenses with any illusion of continuity.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Louisa Babari, AFRICA<\/i>, 2025. Based on \u201cFragment of a Statue of a Woman<\/i>,\u201d\nConstantine, Algeria. \u00a9 Louisa Babari <\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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This connection does not imply any claimed lineage. It stems from the vocabulary that Babari uses spontaneously. Born in Moscow and trained in Russian studies and film, she describes her collages as matrices similar to film stock, conceived in terms of shots and editing, and her Journal d\u2019un \u00e9tudiant alg\u00e9rien \u00e0 Moscou<\/i> [Diary of an Algerian Student in Moscow], acquired by the MAC, traces the movements of Algerian students throughout the Eastern Bloc after independence. The rupture she inherits is colonial, prolonged by independence and by dispersion. In both situations, the image ceases to be a container of information and becomes an instrument of reorganization. Archaeology uncovers fragments, the archive classifies them, montage rearranges them, and history emerges as an effect of their arrangement. \u201cAFRICA\u201d thus composes an \u201cimage-Africa\u201d rather than an \u201cimage of Africa\u201d\u2014a field where heterogeneous temporalities coexist without reconciling. This is what allows the exhibition to produce the past without claiming to reconstruct it.<\/p>

Finally, it would be too simplistic to separate the exhibition from the venue hosting it. The stele of Saturn was transported from Skikda to France in the 19th century; the acknowledgments list the Louvre alongside the museums of Algiers and Constantine; and the entire event is part of the Mediterranean Season, the Grand Arles Express, and the bicentennial of photography. A second collage thus operates at the institutional level, bringing together Algeria, France, Antiquity, cultural diplomacy, and heritage\u2014all brought together under the banner of \u201cAfrica.\u201d Whether it involves displacement, restitution, reconciliation, or simply an institutional arrangement, the question deserves to remain open, and the exhibition\u2014which so effectively demonstrates how arrangements shape narratives\u2014provides visitors with the means to ask it for themselves. One leaves with a different question in mind. It is no longer a matter of knowing what \u201cauthentic Africa\u201d was, but rather what becomes of the images when we stop asking them to recreate the past.<\/p>

\u2014 Louisa Babari, \u201cAFRICA,\u201d Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Contemporain (MAC), Marseille, through January 3, 2027.<\/b><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Louisa Babari, AFRICA<\/i>, 2025. Based on \u201cFragment of a Statue of a Woman<\/i>,\u201d\nConstantine, Algeria. \u00a9 Louisa Babari <\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Contemporain (MAC) in Marseille, Louisa Babari brings together photomontages, archaeological artifacts, a slideshow, and a sound installation exploring ancient North Africa. Is this an attempt to recover a lost past? The exhibition \u201cAFRICA\u201d does something even stranger: it pieces together a past that was never whole, thereby shifting the question our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21503,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1605],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas-and-discussions"],"yoast_head":"\n"AFRICA": Constructing the Past — Diptykmag<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.diptykmag.com\/en\/africa-constructing-the-past\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""AFRICA": Constructing the Past — Diptykmag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"At the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Contemporain (MAC) in Marseille, Louisa Babari brings together photomontages, archaeological artifacts, a slideshow, and a sound installation exploring ancient North Africa. 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