Kader Attia's Alternative History of the Grands Ensembles, from France to Algeria and Back

The French phrase “grand ensemble” designates a modernist residential housing typology consisting of the repetition of standardized units into vast-scale compositions. The grands ensembles were imported from France to Algeria by way of colonialism. At the onset of the postcolonial era, the dense migration of groups of people in the other direction, from Algeria to France, where more grands ensembles were constructed to house them, brought this episode of architectural history full circle. How have French-Algerian residents of postcolonial grands ensembles perceived, metabolized, and responded to this circulation of people and architectural forms in time and space? To answer this question, this chapter turns to the collages of Kader Attia (b. 1970), a French-Algerian artist who spent his formative years as a resident of grands ensembles in postcolonial France. This chapter argues that Attia's collages tell a resident-centric architectural history of the grands ensembles across France and Algeria, thus proposing alternative conceptions of modernity and its relation to vernacular traditions.

Keywords: Algeria ; collage ; colonialism ; contemporary art ; France ; migration ; postcolonialism ; residents ; social housing ; vernacular architecture