What the festival is all about...

Viva Algeria is not about 'showcasing' Algerian culture... It's about enjoying the work of talented artists and musicians, learning from working together and thinking about both the links and - paradoxically - the separations which produce communities. As well as working on delivering the festival, we're reflecting also on what the model of our festival might be. Below is a fragment of a text in which we begin to think through what it might mean to engage with 'Algerian culture'.

Every separation is a link.
(Simone Weil)

What is an encounter? How might we theorise the in-between, the empty-full space between individuals, communities, societies? Is it possible to imagine it as neither line nor void, but rather as a frontier zone or membrane, perhaps, which, as Peter Sloterdijk reminds us, both conjoins and separates? What might it mean to inhabit this richly ambiguous and temporally complex space; to linger in the realm of the metaxu described by Simone Weil as a separating-connecting wall of resonant communication, where response, interaction and co-creation might take place? What then does it mean to ‘showcase’ Algerian culture in the UK? How to account for the complex, knotty web of links and separations which characterise a relationship that is both distanced and proximal, historically and in the present? For Sloterdijk, human co-existence can be expressed in terms of foam, an agglomeration of bubbles or cells that provides a model of multiple juxtaposed spaces to counter conceptions of human activity based on the totalising One (which he associates with imperialism and even fascism): ‘The One Sphere has exploded. But foam lives’. Foam, because it is neither binary nor centred, undoes the hegemonic topology of the centre and the margin. No longer the order of satellites orbiting a celestial body, but rather the cloudy, rhizomic drift and swell of multiple and various intensities of connection. No longer the dull shock produced by the collision and hierarchical chaining of substantive bodies, but the shuddering encounter of co-fragilities. No longer the depression of the serial, but the impermanent concentration of that which is never repeated. A social space imagined then as one of ‘spatial pluralities whose cells can never be truly united nor truly separated’, having in common nothing more (or nothing less?) than a fragility which ‘must be thought of as the place and the mode of everything which is most real’.