facility:port of algiers

    • Et du meme auteur : #Saphir :

      ‘Saphir’ consists of a two-screen video projection, and a series of photographs, by the London-based French/Algerian artist Zineb Sedira, shot in and around the port of Algiers. The exhibition contrasts Sedira’s re-encounter with the sights and sounds of Algiers with an awareness that while she, like many other people from France, is enjoying her return to the city, some of its other residents, disenchanted young men in particular, often dream of escape across the water to Europe. The title ‘Saphir’ (French for sapphire) is reflective of this, evoking not only the pure maritime light that is typical of Algiers, but also those flickering glimmers on the horizon that symbolise people’s dreams and aspirations. In Arabic, the word ‘safir’ also means ambassador, a person who travels between different places, but who is also the representative of one country on the soil of another. 



      This play of meaning is extended through two central characters. The first of these is an Algerian man who walks across town, with no apparent purpose, and silently watches the daily ferries arrive and depart from the port. His image is counterposed by that of an older woman, a daughter of the pieds noirs (a term for European settlers who left Algeria after its Independence). She inhabits the Safir Hotel, one of the grand landmarks of French colonial Algiers whose imposing architecture is a powerful and resonant reminder of a past that still casts its light, and its shadow, over the city. Gazing out to sea from its balconies, before withdrawing to the faded grandeur of its lobbies and halls, the woman not only echoes the man’s restless movement but reinforces a wider sense of languor, inertia and enclosure. Although both characters circle within their own separate but parallel worlds, their paths often appear to intersect but without any denouement or conclusion.

      Confronting the contemporary life of the city with an older and more ambivalent legacy, ‘Saphir’ presents a portrait of Algiers at a transitional moment, its local character gradually becoming absorbed into the current of increasing globalisation.

      Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and The Photographers’ Gallery.

      Funded by Arts Council England and The Henry Moore Foundation.

      http://www.fvu.co.uk/projects/detail/commissions/saphir

  • UAE’s Algeria outreach means more than just business | GulfNews.com
    http://m.gulfnews.com/opinion/uae-s-algeria-outreach-means-more-than-just-business-1.1195786

    The past few weeks have seen a number of senior-level meetings between Algerian and UAE officials. The UAE foreign minister led a high-level delegation to Algiers at the end of last month to build up on the Joint Committee meetings that were held in Abu Dhabi just two weeks earlier. Already Dubai-based DP World is managing two ports in the North African state, including the port of Algiers. In 2009, Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala started operating a $900 million (Dh3.31 billion) power plant in Tipaza with state energy giant Sonatrach. Last year, Ras Al Khaimah-based Julphar Pharmaceuticals laid the foundation stone for a factory in Algiers to serve the Algerian market and North Africa.

    The signs have been positive even before the Arab uprisings began with trade between the UAE and Algeria growing at 60 per cent annually from 2005 when it was $16 million to about $173 million in 2010 — partly thanks to the 10,000 Algerians residing in the UAE. Algeria’s gross domestic product, at almost $200 billion is only about half of UAE’s this year. However, it is growing at an impressive rate and has tripled in the decade to 2011. Bilateral trade between the two countries, at $271 million in the first eight months of last year, is negligible and needs to be encouraged to grow. The size of Algeria’s sovereign wealth fund was believed to be $57 billion in 2011 (compared to Abu Dhabi’s $400-$600 billion ADIA fund), while the country’s foreign reserves are believed to be $200 billion — thanks to high oil prices.

    But business is just one component of this increasingly strategic relationship. Algeria today is the last major civil Arab state, following the rise of a Shiite Islamist state in Iraq, a Sunni Islamist state in Egypt and the collapse of the state in Syria.

    Algeria, despite the existence of half a dozen Islamic political parties is neither a Salafist nor a Brotherhood state. Its 36 million-strong population makes it the second largest Arab state demographically after Egypt and with an area of 2,381,741 square kilometres is the largest Arab country. Algeria also has a well-trained army and the largest military budget in Africa. In fact, Algeria is said to have “the most powerful and best-equipped military in North Africa and the Sahel”.

    Algeria’s special forces are also a force to reckon with. Last January, a hostage crisis ensued at the In Amenas gas plant, lasting several days and resulting in around 40 hostages being killed and 800 survivors leading up to the rescue. One of the survivors remarked that the Algerian military ‘did a bloody good job’. Compare this with the hostage crisis of 2004 in the Beslan school in Russia in which 334 out of the 1,120 hostages were killed during the botched rescue operation.