2019 - ongoing

Carmen Amengual, Fragments from Algiers, 2019. Super 8 to digital, 4:52 min.

Carmen Amengual, Fragments from Algiers, 2019. Super 8 to digital, 4:52 min.

Carmen Amengual, Fragments from Algiers, 2019. Super 8 to digital, 4:52 min.

Fragments from Algiers is an investigation in-progress on an episode in the movement of solidarity among Third World countries in the 1970s: the first Third World Filmmakers Meeting, held in Algiers in 1973. Stemming from a tenuous archive (a pile of slides, some objects and letters) left by the artist’s mother, in addition to research and collection of oral histories, this project explores the story of four South American friends who, after organizing the encounter, made plans to film a documentary on the decolonial movements in the region.

Rather than providing a historical account, the project attempts to trace the dreams, desires, and imagery of this group of friends in their pursuit of personal and political emancipation through film.

Experimenting with storytelling, documentary forms, and modes of installation, this project aims to imaginatively reconstruct these friends’ trip through the Algerian desert and the film project that never materialized. 


By bringing this forgotten episode to our current times, Amengual attempts to trace a bridge between that past—occluded by military violence—and the present, establishing a continuity with the disrupted revolutionary project.