Oubour curated by Vanessa Brito and Suspended spaces and Femmes d'Alger dans leurs nouveaux appartements curated by Vanessa Brito

Two Marseille-based exhibitions in early spring of 2023 emphasized Algeria's influence upon the southern French city, both past and present: Femmes d'Alger dans leurs nouveaux appartements and Oubour. Marseille, the country's second largest city, is home to significant numbers of residents who trace their ancestry to north Africa, the majority of whom originated in Algeria.¹Femmes d'Alger was curated by Vanessa Brito, while Oubour was co-curated by Brito and the Paris-based Suspended spaces collective. Frequent Suspended spaces collaborator Kader Attia was a galvanizing force in the conception of the collective's project Traverser [To cross], out of which the Oubour exhibition emerged (Fig. 1). In Traverser, the journal published concurrently with the group show, collective members Daniel Lê, Françoise Parfait, and Eric Valette described to Brito how the project began with Attia's interest in Ghardaïa, an eleventh century Amazigh Islamic city complex in Algeria's Mzab valley, on...